A professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington, Ross Gay was born in Youngstown, Ohio. He holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD from Temple University. His debut collection, Against Which (CavanKerry Press, 2006), was followed by Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His essay collection The Book of Delights (Algonquin, 2019) was a New York Times bestseller. He is a founding member of the Bloomington Community Orchard.
