The Author

Ross Gay was born in Youngstown, Ohio, but moved with his family at a young age to an apartment complex just outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he grew up listening to his parents' old records and playing games of manhunt and pickup football with the other children who lived in the building. It was in those games that he first learned to negotiate collaborative practices; to create shared languages. Gay's father was a restaurant manager and his mother was a teacher and a copyeditor; they cultivated a passion for both language and food in their children. Gay's older brother became an English teacher and high school principal and food—its joy, its practice, its ability to nurture—figure frequently in Gay’s writing. He himself is an accomplished home cook: "I’m a knockout. An 11," he shared when asked to evaluate his cooking skills during the Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show.

His journey towards poetry—a journey that remains ongoing—had many trajectories. One version of the story, as Gay tells it, began in an American literature class that he took in college. He attended Lafayette College to play football, describing himself as "slow to the college part of it" (Creative Independent). A professor gave him a poem called "An Agony. As Now." by Amiri Baraka. "I read it and it changed my life," Gay said in an interview with the Creative Independent. "I read the poem and then I started reading poems." Gay went on to major in English and art, and then to earn an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD in English from Temple University. He has authored four books of poetry:

• Against Which (CavanKerry Press, 2006)
• Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011)
• Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)
• Be Holding (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

A collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019. Another book of essays, Inciting Joy, was released by Algonquin in 2022. Gay was interviewed for the Wichita Public Library's Read Return Repeat podcast in 2024.

Through his writing, he explores both the sweetness and tenderness of joy, and its wildness and labor. "It’s rigorous, more rigorous I think than misery. To me, joy is as much about being able to hold each other’s sorrows as it is having a good day" (Wisconsin Public Radio).

A professor at Indiana University, Gay lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where he is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a nonprofit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy program. Among the vegetables and flowers in his own yard, Gay has planted fig trees from his Pennsylvania hometown: "One of my best friends, his family was about to move out of our hometown, and his father was and is a beautiful gardener and had these fig trees, and I needed to transplant those fig trees so I could keep some of my hometown in my life.... And I remember very much when I was looking for a house that I was looking for a place where I could put these trees. And those trees are there. And they’re all around Bloomington...." (Poetry Foundation).