Best-selling and award-winning poets and essayists Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ross Gay will be reading from their latest books and answering audience questions. Click the link to register for the event!
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
is the author of the New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of
nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, WORLD OF WONDERS: IN PRAISE OF FIREFLIES, WHALE
SHARKS, & OTHER ASTONISHMENTS (2020, Milkweed
Editions), which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year. She has
four previous poetry collections: OCEANIC (Copper Canyon
Press, 2018), LUCKY
FISH (2011), AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO (2007),
and MIRACLE
FRUIT (2003), the last three from Tupelo Press.
Her most recent chapbook is LACE & PYRITE, a
collaboration of garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice
in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN,
Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House. She
is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s
MFA program.
Ross Gay is the
author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing
the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of
Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle
Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His new poem, Be Holding,
was released from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September of 2020. His
collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released
by Algonquin Books, and he is also the co-author, with Aimee
Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook "Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two
Gardens," in addition to being co-author, with Rosechard Wehrenberg,
of the chapbook, "River." He is a founding editor of the online
sports magazine Some Call it Ballin', in
addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q
Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a
founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard,
a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He also works
on The
Tenderness Project, and has received fellowships from Cave
Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim
Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.