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Meet Author Ross Gay

Join us when author Ross Gay visits to discuss his new collection, The Book of (More) Delights.

About the author:

Ross Gay is the New York Times bestselling author of the essay collections The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy and four books of poetry. His Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Be Holding won the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award and was recently performed as a play. Gay is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.

Adept at making a bounty out of the everyday, Gay again gives voice to the human desire for joy with The Book of (More) Delights: Essays, a timely reminder that delight exists all around us, if we take the time to look for it. And even as he acknowledges racism, consumerism, climate change, and individual pain—the forces that endanger joy—he shows us that our shared sorrow can bring us together. These new essays, also written over the course of a year, are resonant and linguistically exquisite―required reading for anyone who has ever had a bad day. Which is to say, all of us.

For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of dancing a little bit with strangers to good songs in the supermarket to the simple pleasure of a potluck supper; from the tenderness Gay feels when he sees an adult wearing braces to the kindness he witnesses when a community bands together to search for a lost cat; from the check-out kid at the co-op with pink hair and a concert shirt showing him a magic trick to the fun of browsing through a beautifully curated bookstore. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious Earth delights us.

Yet as much as these joyous essays proclaim yes; they at times declare no—because for Gay, practicing delight can also be an act of defiance in a broken world. “We’ve been mandated, over the past several years, to be suspicious of one another,” Gay writes. “To regard each other as potential vectors of doom. These essays refuse that, and refuse those who would convince us to do so, by wondering instead, and sometimes militantly, what if we regarded each other as potential vectors of delight? To the best of their ability, they do so by trying to notice what there is to love. We do not sing about what delights us, what we love, only for ourselves. It’s for each other that we sing about what we love.”

Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Mac's Backs - Books on Coventry.