ROSS GAY was born on August 1, 1974 in Youngstown, Ohio. He received a BA in English/Art from Lafayette College, an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and a PhD in English from Temple University. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2015 NAACP Image Awards, all in poetry categories; Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), and Against Which (Cavankerry Press, 2006). Gay is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin’, and an editor of the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. His honors include fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the Guggenheim Foundation. He currently teaches at Indiana University and in Drew University’s Low-Residency MFA Program.
Ross Gay
This Year's Festival Lineup includes:
Many poets find it challenging to revise their work without the help of a workshop group or mentor. This inter-active workshop will focus on how can we acquire the tools we need to revise poems ... Read more >
If we are all telling the same stories of love, sex, and death, how can we sidestep cliché? With a trifecta of close readings of contemporary poems, practical lessons designed to deepen your understanding of ... Read more >
In his famous early poem, “Digging,” Seamus Heaney says that to write poems he’ll “dig,” as a farmer does, in the earth of life and language with a pen. In this workshop we’ll work on ... Read more >
Donald Hall once wrote: “Poetry . . . wants to address the whole matter of the human—including fact and logic, but also the body with its senses, and above all the harsh complexities of emotion.” ... Read more >
In this workshop, we will talk about poems from around the world and also discuss your own work. Everyone will receive a line-by-line reading of their poetry. The details, images and sounds, the aspects of ... Read more >
This workshop will emphasize sound in poetry: pauses, silences, nonsense words, ordinary speech. After you finish this workshop, and without sacrificing sense, you will be able to incorporate into your poems effects ranging from sonic ... Read more >
“Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation,” writes poet Wallace Stevens. In this workshop, we will explore how to “make sense” of poetry’s relationship to the unconscious and the use we can make of this ... Read more >
The word persona comes from the Latin term for mask. A number of American poets—Ai, Rita Dove, Andrew Hudgins, Tyehimba Jess, Natasha Trethewey, and Kevin Young—have adopted linguistic masks to create new and complicated narratives. This workshop ... Read more >
In this generative workshop we’ll consider the craft decisions we make in free-verse poems: How are the elements of the poem working on their own? How do they work with—or against—each other? How might form ... Read more >
The festival welcomes Joy Harjo to the festival as our Special Guest. She will be interviewed with Laure-Anne Bosselaar and will deliver the annual Thomas Lux Memorial Reading following the festival gala. We congratulate her ... Read more >
The festival Poet At Large will appear for a special evening reading on Friday, January 24th, and also present to high school students throughout Palm Beach County during festival week. This year’s Poet At Large ... Read more >
Additional focus on your work is available in individual one-hour conferences on up to 10 pages of poetry. Conference Faculty: Lorna Knowles Blake, Sally Bliumis-Dunn, and Angela Narciso Torres. Applicants may request a conference with ... Read more >