Arts & Culture

Raymond Carver Reading Series Continues with Author Ross Gay

Friday, February 17, 2017, By Kevin Morrow

The 2016-17 Raymond Carver Reading Series continues on Wednesday, March 1, with Ross Gay, recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award in Poetry. He will participate in a Q&A at 3:45 p.m. and will read from his work at 5:30 p.m., with both activities taking place in Huntington Beard Crouse Hall’s Gifford Auditorium.

Gay is the author of three books: “Against Which” (Cavankerry Press, 2006); “Bringing the Shovel Down” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011); and “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)—winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. “Catalog” was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, the Ohioana Book Award, the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

Gay is the co-author of the chapbooks “Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens” and “River”; an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press; and a founding editor of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin’.

He is also a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a “nonprofit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project.”

Gay has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Guggenheim Foundation.

He teaches at Indiana University.

The Raymond Carver Reading Series is presented by the M.F.A. program in creative writing in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences. The events are free and open to the public. Parking is available in SU pay lots.

The series is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Syracuse University Library Associates, Stephen King, the Dr. Scholl Foundation, the Lynn & David Pleet ’53 Fund for Creative Writing, the Richard Elman Visiting Writer Fund, The Friends of Creative Writing, Chris Tennyson, Jerome Cohen, the Jane and Daniel Present Fund, and the Interdisciplinary Fund for the Humanities from Leonard and Elise Elman.