Acclaimed poet Ross Gay launches his new collection BE HOLDING live. This event includes reading, discussion moderated by Patrick Rosal, and audience Q&A.

Be Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving—known as Dr. J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and ‘80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia ‘76ers.

But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love.

Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.

Poet and Essayist Patrick Rosal moderates the conversation, and introduces the official re-launch of Some Call It Ballin', the sports magazine that Rosal and Gay published with Karissa Chen for 3 glorious issues (somecallitballin.com).

Ross Gay teaches poetry at Indiana University and is the author of the poetry collections Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens (with Aimee Nezhukumatathil), River
(with Rose Wehrenberg), Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and most recently, the essay collection The Book of Delights.

Patrick Rosalis a writer, musician, composer, interdisciplinary artist, and author of four books, most recently Brooklyn Antediluvian, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize. He has earned fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Senior Research Program. A professor of English at Rutgers-Camden, he is founding co-editor of the sports literary magazine Some Call It Ballin’. Having read and performed widely across four continents and at hundreds of venues throughout the United States, he continues to design interdisciplinary public art projects through the ad hoc Institute for Contemporary Collaborative Imagining. He has led writing workshops for youth, incarcerated populations, and many other communities across the country. His forthcoming title, The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems is due out from Persea Books in 2021.

Presented in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh Press and The Field Office.

Ross Gay: Be Holding Book Release Party