Please register for the event here.

In partnership with Maryland Center for the Book at Maryland Humanities, Enoch Pratt Free Library and the Ivy Bookshop will co-host writer/poet Ross Gay for a stop on the virtual 2021 One Maryland One Book Author Tour. Described as “a collection of genre-defying essays,” Gay’s The Book of Delights is this year’s selection for the program. The Author Tour takes place this fall from October 3 – 6. Registration is free, but required. Registration will open around Labor Day. One Maryland One Book is a program of Maryland Humanities.

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His new poem, Be Holding, was released from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September of 2020. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019. 

In conversation with Ross Gay is Lia Purpura. Lia Purpura is the author of nine collections of essays, poems, and translations. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Looking (essays, Sarabande Books), her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as five Pushcart Prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction, and others.  Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, Emergence, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, MD, where she is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has taught in the Rainier Writing Workshop’s MFA program, at Breadloaf Writers Conference, The University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA program and at conferences, workshops, and graduate programs throughout the country. Her newest collection of poems is It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin) and her latest collection of essays is All the Fierce Tethers (Sarabande Books).

ASL interpretation will be available for attendees.

Local Partners include: CityLit Project, Farm Alliance of Baltimore, CHARM: Voices of Baltimore Youth.

Order your copy of The Book of Delights from the Ivy Bookshop.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.