Ross Gay

Ross Gay is an American poet and essayist known for his expansive, joyful, formally innovative work that draws on questions of Black life, ecology, and American culture. Born in Youngstown, Ohio, he holds a BA from Lafayette College, an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and a PhD in American Literature from Temple University. His poetry collection Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude (2015) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. The collection is celebrated for its long, capacious lines and its insistence on praise, pleasure, and communal life. His earlier collections include Against Which (2006) and Bringing the Shovel Down (2011). Be Holding (2020), a book-length poem about Julius Erving's legendary flying slam dunk in the 1980 NBA Finals, won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Gay has also written a beloved essay collection, The Book of Delights (2019), and its sequel, Inciting Joy (2022), both bestsellers. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cave Canem Foundation. He is a professor of English at Indiana University and co-founder of Ithaca's Garden of Eden, a community food forest. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.