We’re beyond thrilled to welcome Midwest Essayist and Poet, Ross Gay, to Grand Rapids for an event guaranteed to delight, and incite joy!

Please note that Ross is excited to meet every attendee and sign and personalize all of their books, however, he does not take photos before or after the event.

This event is free to attend, however, it helps us in planning to receive your RSVP.

About Inciting Joy:

From New York Times bestselling author Ross Gay comes a "brilliant" intimate and electrifying collection of essays about the joy that comes from connection (Ada Limón, U.S. poet laureate).

In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it.

Taking a clear-eyed look at injustice, political polarization, and the destruction of the natural world, Gay shows us how we might resist, how the study of joy might lead us to a wild, unpredictable, transgressive, and unboundaried solidarity. In fact, it just might help us survive.

In an era when divisive voices take up so much airspace, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love?

Not able to join us? Order your copy here: https://www.schulerbooks.com/b...

About The Book of (More) Delights:

From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us.

The author of the New York Times bestselling The Book of Delights is back with a new record of small wonders—and it is exactly the book we need right now.

In this second intimate collection of short, lyrical, genre-defying essays, again written daily over a year, one of America’s most original and observant voices celebrates the ordinary, helping us see our extraordinary world anew. Among Ross Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: bonding with a pipsqueak of a puppy, observing how his mother bakes eighteen kinds of cookies before her grandchildren arrive, noticing the tenderness he feels when he sees an adult wearing braces, and the recognition that for him the preamble is often more delightful than the thing itself: “Putting on your socks and tying up your shoes, and, if you’re the type, filling up your water bottle and doing some light stretching, but skipping the walk entirely.”

For Gay, practicing delight is an act of defiance in an often unjust world, as necessary as breathing. Even as he acknowledges racism, consumerism, ecological devastation, and our individual sorrows—he shows us that the un-delights make the delights even more so. As always, Gay revels in natural world—a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, the garlic that grows abundantly in his garden (along with collards and kale leaves and purple osaka mustards, pineapple sage, sweet potatoes, etc.), a field of sunflowers turning toward the sun, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.

Not able to join us? Order your copy here: https://www.schulerbooks.com/b...

About the Author:

Ross Gay is the New York Times bestselling author of the essay collections The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy and four books of poetry. His Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Be Holding won the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. Gay is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.