Kay Ryan

Poet Laureate.

from Time Magazine:

She has kept herself at a remove from the poetry community and has happily taught remedial English at the College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif., for nearly 30 years.

"It was mainly second-language students and students who lost their way in school," Ryan says. "They wanted something that I could help them get: an understanding of the basic elements of grammar, pronouns, those pesky apostrophes. The goal was to write an effective paragraph that was coherent and well supported. We aspired to the semicolon, but that rarely happened."