2026 Frank B. Hanes Writer-in-Residence, Ross Gay, Reading

In his book of essays Inciting Joy, Ross Gay writes, “…we often think of joy as meaning “without pain,” or “without sorrow,” “[but] …what if joy needs sorrow?” In these essays, Gay illustrates how joy and sorrow are braided together. Gay encourages us to invite sorrow in to “make sorrow some tea from the lemon balm in the garden.” Gather friends, family, and strangers to be together with our sorrow, yet together. Gay’s poems and prose assemble our collective witnessing and our collective duty to those with us now and those who come after us into sprawling, intelligent, and tender writing. In Gay’s most recent poetry collection, Be Holding: A Poem, a tribute to Julius Erving, Gay continues to explore themes of joy, this time through Dr. J’s infamous shot at the 1980s NBA Finals, state violence, and childhood. The Kenyon Review writes, “in moving passages about his own loving but economically hard-pressed upbringing in a biracial family, Gay poses the living breath of memory against the dispiriting museum of pain.”

Through the years Gay has put into words the joy we find unattainable—the joy under the rock of loss. He is the author of four poetry collections: Against Which (2006); Bringing the Shovel Down (2011); Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and shortlisted for the National Book Award; and Be Holding: A Poem (2020), winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award and the Indiana Authors Award. He is the author of three essay collections: The Book of Delights (2019), winner of the Indiana Authors Award and a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy (2022), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Ohio Book Award; and The Book of (More) Delights (2023), shortlisted for the Ohio Book Award.

Whether in poetry or prose, Ross Gay illuminates humanity’s tenderness and cruelty, our inclination towards compassion, and our ability to cause harm. Through his writing he has a remarkable ability to explore and unpack the complexities of joy and grief. As Gay writes in an interview with Inscape Journal, “I think partly the reason is because joy is never separate from grief. Joy is never separate from devastation or catastrophe. Joy is always acknowledging, aware of, and in the midst of those things.” Similar to Lucille Clifton, Ross Gay is one of the few writers who have dedicated their work to the study of joy. In an interview with David Naimon for the podcast Between the Covers, Gay says, “When I’m talking about joy, again, joy is a long study for me, but I’m talking about some kind of feeling that emerges when we are trying to hold each other’s sorrow and trying to be with each other in the midst of, in the face of, etc, of the fact of our pain.”