Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry, including Be Holding (winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award) and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award). His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, was released by Algonquin in October of 2022. Girard College’s Be Holding, which uses Gay’s poem of the same name as its libretto, explores themes of Black genius and beauty in the face of racial violence and inequities in a multidisciplinary performance developed by professional artists with Girard College students.
