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(BLOOMINGTON) – Ross Gay’s collection of essays “The Book of Delights” was named the 2020 nonfiction winner in the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Awards. Gay is a member of the Department of English’s core faculty.
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Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essays—some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages—that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves.
Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: the way Botan Rice Candy wrappers melt in your mouth, the volunteer crossing guard with a pronounced tremor whom he imagines as a kind of boat-woman escorting pedestrians across the River Styx, a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, pickup basketball games, the silent nod of acknowledgment between black people. And more than any other subject, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world – his garden, the flowers in the sidewalk, the birds, the bees, the mushrooms, the trees.
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Every two years, the Indiana Authors Awards recognize books written by Hoosier authors in the children’s, emerging, fiction, genre, nonfiction, poetry and young adult categories.