He teaches at Indiana University and in Drew University ’s low-residency MFA program. He is an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press and is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin ’. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Cave Canem, and the Bread Loaf Writer ’s Conference. Gay is the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens (2014), and with Richard Wehrenberg, Jr., River (2014). Ross Gay often finds delight in the smallest of objects: a flower thriving in a sidewalk crack, or two people sharing the work of carrying a bag. Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying collection of essays - some as short as a paragraph some as long as five pages - that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. He has also published an essay collection, The Book of Delights (2019). 16) Discuss Gay’s ability to overlap themes of systemic racism, delight and kindness, loss and sorrow, often in the space of one essay.

He is the author of Be Holding (2020) Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award Bringing the Shovel Down (2011) and Against Which (2006). He earned a BA from Lafayette College, an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and a PhD in English from Temple University. Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essayssome as short as a paragraph some as long as five pagesthat record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives.

Ross gay's the book of delights