Kay Ryan, a 62-year-old poet who has taught remedial English at the College of Marin, in Kentfield, Calif., for 30 years, will be the nation’s new poet laureate. James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, made the announcement today.

“Kay Ryan is a distinctive and original voice within the rich variety of contemporary American poetry,” Mr. Billington said. “She writes easily understandable short poems on improbable subjects. Within her compact compositions there are many surprises in rhyme and rhythm and in sly wit pointing to subtle wisdom.”

Her fellow poet J.D. McClatchy has compared her work to Eric Satie’s miniatures or Joseph Cornell’s boxes. Here, for instance, is her take on that old saw about the other shoe:

Oh if it wereonly the othershoe hangingin space beforejoining its mate.

Ms. Ryan was born in San Jose, Calif., and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles. She has been a resident of Marin County since 1971. In a 2004 interview, she told the Christian Science Monitor that “I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy.”

A profile in today’s New York Times and another in The Washington Post describe the long and winding road — much of it traveled on a mountain bike — by which Ms. Ryan arrived at literary success.

At UCLA, according to the Post, “the poems she submitted were judged not to meet the poetry club’s standards. She ‘leaped away, mortally stung,’ and afterward ‘stayed pretty remote from the joining business.’” She has never taken a creative-writing class, and she was close to 40 before she began to find places to publish her work.

The new poet laureate will take up her duties this fall. “I thought I might take it upon myself to prevent all bad poetry from being published during my reign,” she told the Post when asked if she had any agenda. —Jennifer Howard