Split This Rock Interview with Ross Gay

Sixth in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, April 14-17, 2016. Pre-registration for #SplitThisRock2016 is open now until March 31st.

Split This Rock is delighted to congratulate Ross Gay on winning the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Award for his astonishing book of poems, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.

by Katy Richey

Ross Gay is the author of three books: Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award. He is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens, in addition to being co-author, with Richard Wehrenberg, Jr., of the chapbook, River. He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin', in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. Ross teaches at Indiana University. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute. Learn more at Ross Gay’s website.

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Ross Gay chatted with Katy Richey at Uel Zing, a coffee shop in Bloomington, Indiana where Ross teaches in the creative writing department at Indiana University. They discussed gardening as inspiration, the enacting of love in poems, and which subjects feel necessary to write.

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Katy Richey’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Fjords Review, Origins, Little Patuxent Review, Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, and other journals. She is the recipient of a 2015 Fine Arts Work Center Walker Scholarship and a 2014 Maryland State Arts Council individual artist award for poetry. She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow and a Breadloaf Writers’ Conference contributor. She is the co-host of the Sunday Kind of Love reading series and open mic at Busboys and Poets in Washington D.C., sponsored by Split This Rock.