In person at Brookline Booksmith! Celebrate the release of Inciting Joy with author Ross Gay.

Register for the event!

This event is ticketed. Your ticket includes a general admission seat at the event and a copy of Inciting Joy.

You will also be alerted to important details about the program, including safety requirements, cancellations, and book signing updates.
 

Livestream!

Barring technical difficulty, this event will be livestreamed. The livestream link will be sent out to anyone who orders a book through the registration page before the event.
 

Signed books!

Your ticket includes a copy of the book. This event will include a live signing at the end of the talk.

Can't make it to the event? Preorder the book on the registration page to have it signed and shipped from the store! You will also receive a link to the livestream.

Inciting Joy: Essays

An intimate and electrifying collection of essays from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights.

In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we expand it.

In “We Kin” he thinks about the garden (especially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come on) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in “Share Your Bucket” he explores skateboarding’s reclamation of public space; he considers the costs of masculinity in “Grief Suite”; and in “Through My Tears I Saw,” he recognizes what was healed in caring for his father as he was dying.

In an era when divisive voices take up so much air space, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love? Full of energy, curiosity, and compassion, Inciting Joy is essential reading from one of our most brilliant writers.

Ross Gay is the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights: Essays and four books of poetry. His Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Be Holding won the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. He is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. Gay has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.