A note of congratulations to Kay Ryan

by Margot Lurie Many congratulations to Parnassus’s friend and contributor Kay Ryan on her receipt of a National Humanities Medal. Ryan adds the medal to a Pulitzer and a MacArthur fellowship, as well as a two-year stint (2008–2010) as our Poet Laureate. But while she may be wreathed in laurels, it’s prickly Joshua trees that illustrate the cover of her selected poems, attesting both to her attachment to California and to the thorny transcendence... Read More