Keynote Speakers

Kay Ryan

The Poet Laureate of the United States, presents the opening keynote on Thursday, November 5 at 7:00 pm in the auditorium of the Fifth Street School. Ryan, known for her compact short poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes, is making her first appearance in Las Vegas. Cosponsored by the City of Las Vegas Office of Cultural Affairs and Black Mountain Institute.

Kay Ryan was born in California in1945 and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and Mojave Desert. She received both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from UCLA. At the age of 19, she stared writing poems and has published six collections of poetry including Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), Say Uncle (2000) and most recently, The Jam Jar Lifeboat and Other Novelties. She is known for her unique brand of brilliantly constructed short poems that revel in wordplay, a sharp wit and internal rhymes.  Earning her status as one of the great living American poets, she was appointed the sixteen Poet Laureate of the United States in 2008 by the Library of Congress. Ryan has said that her poems are spare, “almost like an empty suitcase… and that the reader takes them out, but they keep multiplying.” Maintaining a career outside the mainstream poetry circuit, Ryan teaches remedial English in California’s Marin County, where she has lived for the last 30 years. She is the recipient of several major awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, the Union League Poetry Prize, and three Pushcart Prizes.

E.L. Doctorow

One of America’s most accomplished and acclaimed living writers, presents the closing keynote on Sunday, November 8 at 7:00 pm at the Clark County Library auditorium, 1401 E. Flamingo. Presented by Black Mountain Institute, Las Vegas-Clark County Library District and the City of Las Vegas and Nevada Humanities.

E.L. Doctorow occupies a central position in the history of American literature. On a shortlist he is generally considered to be among the most talented, ambitious, and admired novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Long celebrated for his vivid evocations of nineteenth– and twentieth-century American life,  Doctorow has received the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal.
Doctorow was born in New York City in 1931. He has held many positions in his life including editor-in-chief of a newspaper and a college professor, but he is best known for his historical novels. With The Book of Daniel, his third novel, Doctorow emerged as an important American novelist with a strongly political bent. His most well known works include Ragtime, published in 1975 and Billy Bathgate, published in 1989, both of which were later made into films. Ragtime was named one of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century by the editorial board of the Modern Library and was adapted into a successful Broadway musical in 1998. The March was published in 2005. Homer and Langley: A Novel was released in September 2009.
Widely acclaimed for the beauty of his prose, his innovative narratives, and above all, for his talent for evoking the past in a way that makes it at once mysterious and familiar, Doctorow has created one of the most substantial bodies of work of any living American writer.