The diverse grantees include a journalist, cellist, clinical psychologist, computer scientist and a former poet laureate of the United States, Kay Ryan, who also received a Pulitzer Prize this year. Ryan is well-known for her compact, vivid and accessible verse.

　　The high honors come as a bit of a surprise to the poet herself, who was raised in what she calls the "glamor-free, ocean-free, hot, stinky, oil-rich, potato-rich" San Joaquin Valley of California.

　　"I have to say that I didn't want to be a poet and I still feel pretty embarrassed about it in a lot of situations because it seemed like putting on airs," Ryan says. "But I found that poetry was nonetheless possessing my mind. Like, if I read a book and it was prose, the prose would start rhyming, and it was kind of a little insanity taking me over."

　　Ryan's poems often explore every day human emotions such as hope, doubt and fear. She has a fluid, soaring imagination, as we see in the poem,"Killing Time."

　　Time is rubbery.

　　If you hide it

　　in the shrubbery

　　it will wait

　　will winter and

　　wash back out

　　with the rainwater.

　　You will find it

　　on your steps again

　　like the newspaper.

　　Time compresses.

　　Stuff it in the

　　couch corner and

　　it will spring out

　　some night or other

　　when you have guests.

　　One of whom guesses.

　　Time stretches.

　　Then it snaps back

　　leaving bare patches

　　that didn't happen.

　　Abandoned time hardens

　　like hidden gun.

　　People feel around.

　　Sooner or later

　　it will be found.

　　Ryan has published seven collections of poetry, beginning with a self-published volume in 1983. But it wasn't until the mid-1990s that she began to acquire a national reputation. In the meantime, she taught remedial English at a community college in Marin County, California, and lived quietly with her longtime spouse, Carol Adair, who died in January 2009.

　　Unlike many poets of her stature, Ryan has never been interested in the busy academic swirl of conferences and university life, or even in the high visibility her poet laureate post, her Pulitzer Prize and now, her MacArthur Genius grant have given her.

　　She says she is already "overly visited by the sensation and the ideas of others" and "would like peace from it most of the time."