For one night only, on Friday, October 25, 2024, join City Arts & Lectures as they host Ross Gay in Conversation with Aracelis Girmay at the Sydney Goldstein Theater. This event includes a poetry reading by Ross Gay and dialogue between the two poets.
A poet on a mission to find & share joy
The writer Ross Gay has become synonymous with joy. In his essays and poetry, Gay asks his readers to find delight and gratitude in the most difficult of circumstances and, in the process, he brings his overflowing kindness and relentless eye for details to community gardens, the lives of Black people, the artistry of basketball and much more.
About Ross Gay
Ross Gay is an award-winning writer and essayist with a mission: help readers explore the beautiful complexities of joy, gratitude and delight. His poetry, in Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Be Holding, and his essays, in the The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy, overflow with his unique vision of all the ways we are connected to each other and the natural world. A professor at Indiana University, Gay enacts the same loves he writes about: basketball and gardening. His most recent collection is a book-length poem dedicated to the basketball icon Dr. J, Julius Irving, and he’s a founding member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit focused on food justice. Gay’s ceaseless focus on the celebration of joy has driven many contemporary writers to follow his example by attempting to find the gaiety of living, even when that living is painful. His most recent essay collection, The Book of (More) Delights, is full of lyric, genre-defying insights into grandma’s cookies, adult braces, geese tending to goslings and Black joy.
About Aracelis Girmay
American poet and multi-genre artist Aracelis Girmay is the author of Kingdom Animalia, a finalist of the National Book Critics Circle Award, along with collage and picture books. She was the editor of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton and So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth. Girmay is currently a professor at Stanford University.
(Photo credits: City Arts & Lectures. Ross Gay. Photo by Natasha Komoda.)
Event details
Hosted by: City Arts & Lectures
Type of event: poetry reading
Featured writers: Ross Gay, in conversation with Aracelis Girmay
Date: Friday, October 25, 2024
Start time: 7:30 PM PT
Duration: TBA
Cost: USD$54.00 (only available seating is in the Orchestra)
Location: Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes Street, San Francisco, CA 94102
Video to give you a glimpse of this poet’s work: Watch Ross Gay reading the poem “Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt”
Booking link: Book your tickets here
Contact Details: City Arts & Lectures, 333 Hayes Street, Suite 202, San Francisco, CA, 94102, USA; 415-563-2463, info@cityarts.net, cityarts.net
Accessibility: Please contact the organizer.
Refund policy: All sales are final. No request for cancellations, changes or refunds is accepted.