The Best of It is a notable work by Kay Ryan, an American poet and writer who also works as a teacher. Ryan composes in English and has received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, one of the most formally recognized awards her career has produced.

Ryan was born on September 21, 1945, in San Jose, California. She pursued her education at Antelope Valley College and subsequently at the University of California, Los Angeles. A citizen of the United States, she has worked as both a poet and a teacher, and her writing in English has earned sustained institutional recognition over the course of her career.

The range of awards Ryan has received reflects attention from multiple professional and public contexts. She was named a MacArthur Fellow and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism extend that recognition across poetry and criticism respectively, while the National Humanities Medal represents a form of public acknowledgment at the national level.

Among the honors Ryan has accumulated, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry stands as the most prominently cited. Her education, which began at Antelope Valley College and continued at the University of California, Los Angeles, preceded a career as a poet, writer, and teacher that produced The Best of It, the work most closely associated with her name, and the full range of distinctions that followed.