During the celebration of Earth Week, the Department of English is hosting two special speakers: award-winning poet and professor Ross Gay and professor and author Thomas S. Davis.
Both events are free and open to the public.
Ross Gay
April 26, 7:30 p.m.
Cherokee Ballroom, LSC
Kingsley Tufts Award and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Gay’s most recent collection 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. In addition, it was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Gay 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 nonprofit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.
The interactive event will feature a reading from Gay’s most recent book of poetry, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, as well as new writing, followed by a discussion on environmental engagement, diversity, inclusion and free speech.
Thomas Davis
April 27, 3:30 p.m.
Room 107, Behavioral Sciences Building
Thomas Davis is associate professor of English at Ohio State University. His research and teaching focuses on modern and contemporary literature and culture, environmental humanities, human rights, and politics and aesthetics.
Davis will present a talk on “Extraction Aesthetics: Life and Death in the Bakken Oilfields,” which is drawn from his recent fieldwork on resource extraction in the Bakken region of North Dakota and focuses on resource extraction aesthetics, documentary film, and indigenous installations that respond to the fossil fuel industry.
His book The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life was published by Columbia University Press in 2015.
