An Interactive Poetry Reading by Ross Gay & Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Join acclaimed poets Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ross Gay at Florida Studio Theater for an evening of poetry grounded in the living world —where identity, memory, land, and joy intersect. Through their work, nature is not scenery but relationship; ancestry is not abstraction but root system; and joy becomes a way of returning to what is most alive within and around us.

This reading and conversation will draw from across their celebrated bodies of work, including OCEANIC by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and CATALOG OF UNABASHED GRATITUDE by Ross Gay. Together, they will explore how the natural world shapes belonging, how wonder can be carried as inheritance, and how joy can be not only personal but communal and radical. This is poetry as connection: to the earth, to each other, and to the deeper truths that sustain us.

Tickets are simply one signed copy of OCEANIC by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and one signed copy of CATALOG OF UNABASHED GRATITUDE by Ross Gay.

The reading will take place on the stage of Florida Studio Theatre's John C. Court Cabaret (1265 1st Street, Sarasota, FL 34236), located in The Hegner Theatre Wing on the corner of Cocoanut and 1st Street.

There will be no seat assignments (first-come, first-served). You will receive your books upon check-in at the theater.

ABOUT AIMEE NEZUKUMATATHIL

Aimee Nezukumatathil is the New York Times best-selling author of the forthcoming poetry book, NIGHT OWL (Mar. 2026), and two illustrated collections of essays, BITE BY BITE and WORLD OF WONDERS: IN PRAISE OF FIREFLIES, WHALE SHARKS, & OTHER ASTONISHMENTS, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's Book of the Year and named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She also wrote four previous award-winning poetry collections: OCEANIC, LUCKY FISH, AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO, and MIRACLE FRUIT. With the poet Ross Gay, she co-authored the chapbook LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration on epistolary garden poems. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review.

Honors include a poetry fellowship from US Artist Fellows, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. For a decade, she served as the poetry editor for Orion and Sierra magazines. A professor of English and Creative Writing for over twenty-five years, she also serves as a firefly guide for Mississippi State Parks. Photo credit: Tenola Plaxico

https://aimeenez.net

ABOUT ROSS GAY

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: AGAINST WHICH; BRINGING THE SHOVEL DOWN; BE HOLDING, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and CATALOG OF UNABASHED GRATITUDE, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays: THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; INCITING JOY was released in 2022, and his newest collection, THE BOOK OF (MORE) DELIGHTS, was released in September of 2023. Photo credit: Natasha Komoda

https://www.rossgay.net

ABOUT THE BOOKS

OCEANIC BY AIMEE NEZUKUMATATHIL

With inquisitive flair, Aimee Nezhukumatathil creates a thorough registry of the earth’s wonderful and terrible magic. In her fourth collection of poetry, she studies forms of love as diverse and abundant as the ocean itself. She brings to life a father penguin, a C-section scar, and Niagara Falls with a powerful force of reverence for life and living things. With an encyclopedic range of subjects and unmatched sincerity, OCEANIC speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the earth, an extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong.

“Nezhukumatathil’s poems contain elegant twists of a very sharp knife. She writes about the natural world and how we live in it, filling each poem, each page with a true sense of wonder.” —Roxane Gay

“What really stitches Oceanic together is Nezhukumatathil’s musical voice. These poems feel crystal clear in their logic and construction, walking carefully from the metaphoric and imagistic to something more transcendent and strange, reminding us that we are linked to the natural world in deep and surprising ways.” —August Smith, BookPage

“Cultural strands are woven into the DNA of her strange, lush… poems. Aphorisms… from another dimension.” —New York Times

“With unparalleled ease, she’s able to weave each intriguing detail into a nuanced, thought-provoking poem that also reads like a startling modern-day fable.” —Poetry Foundation

“How wonderful to watch a writer who was already among the best young poets get even better!” —Terrance Hayes

“Reading Nezhukumatathil’s poems is a practice in keenly observing life’s details. The poet writes with a romantic sensibility about a world saturated with a deep sense of loss. Recommended for all poetry readers, especially those interested in ecopoetry.” —Library Journal

“Sensual and vivid, [Nezhukumatathil’s] poems invite us deep into the water, where ‘colors humans have / not yet named glow in caves made from black coral and clamshell.’ Her images are lush with eroticism, always close to the body and its experience of wonder. She blurs the line between human and animal, casting herself (and her beloved) variously as a scallop, a whale shark, a penguin, a starfish. Such marvelous acts of transformation reshape us as we read.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“… from the poetic structures that cultivate dazzling settings to the metaphors that brim with possibility, Oceanic… reawakens my curiosity for a world that still holds so many undiscovered wonders.” —Literary Review

“[Oceanic] is an important work, both for its poetic merits and for its incisive capture of the increasingly precarious nature of life, both human and nonhuman, on this planet.” —Ploughshares

“… Throughout Oceanic, Nezhukumatathil upends conventional notions of both what power looks like and what safety means. For her, the natural forces human beings have long regarded as dangerous—tigers, snakes, lava—can be sources not just of power but also of safety.” —Georgia Review

“Perfect for readers with a voracious appetite and a burgeoning curiosity.” —Literary Hub

“ Despite its title, Oceanic is much more than a love letter to the ocean. Full of poems that are passionate about the environment without being preachy, that beautifully name and describe the natural world, and that honor self, love, and family, Oceanic is a celebration of nature and of life itself.” —Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Rumpus

“Her poems invoke a sense of connectedness… Nezhukumatathil weaves meditations on parenting and family-making among her lavishly rendered evocations of flora and fauna… Nezhukumatathil’s voice is consistent in its awe.” —Publishers Weekly

“Oceanic is a generous, romantic, and ambitious look at the different stages of life, and how we experience the love and wonder that lead us to become more fully realized and compassionate as we grow each decade… [it’s] Nezhukumatathil’s most cohesive collection to date, as she takes her prior preoccupations and dissects them in new ways that invite, as all of her work does, a sense of marvel and astonishment.” —Tin House

“Oceanic is a story of restoration, and the end goal is love.” —Tupelo Quarterly

“One thing to know about Nezhukumatathil’s poems, even when they resemble fragments on a visual plane, is that she is always writing clear sentences whose meanings turn back on themselves or which slowly reveal more of the narrative.”—Diane Mehta, Electric Lit

CATALOG OF UNABASHED GRATITUDE BY ROSS GAY

Winner, 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award | Winner, 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award | Finalist, 2015 NAACP Image Awards | Finalist, 2015 National Book Award | Named to The Atlantic’s Best American Poetry of the 21st Century List

CATALOG OF UNABASHED GRATITUDE is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.

Like one big celebration bursting with joy . . . Gay's poems burst forth in leggy, unexpected ways, zooming in on legs furred with pollen or soil breast-stroking into the xylem. Gay's praise is Whitmanesque, full of manure, mulberry-stained purple bird poop, dirty clothes and hangovers, but also the pleasure of bare feet, of pruning a peach tree, of feeding a neighbor. . . . Whether you're feeling like you have a whole brass band of gratitude or if you're feeling like you only have a rusty horn, read this book. Gay even thanks you for reading it, saying 'I can't stop my gratitude, which includes dear reader, you for staying here with me, for moving your lips just so as I speak.'

Tess Taylor, NPR, All Things Considered

Sweetness recurs in Gay’s collection, in the form of abundant fruit—figs, pears, berries—and in the dominant emotion of these poems: joy. Here, even death is transformed into the syrupy juice of a stone fruit dripping down a chin. Gay describes sprinkling his father’s ashes at the base of a tree and then finding the dead man’s spirit transferred into its bounty, “almost dancing now in the plum, / in the tree, the way he did as a person.” The poems are redolent of spring, full of verdant growth and birdsong. Perhaps such happy poetry shouldn’t be so unusual, but Gay’s odes to such everyday pleasures as sleeping in his clothes or drinking water from his hands bring a rare satisfaction. “Friends this is the realest place I know, / it makes me squirm like a worm I am so grateful,” he writes in one poem, and this sentiment captures it all, both the cheerful squirming and the gratitude simply for being alive.

The Atlantic

Ross Gay offers up a muscled poetry of a thousand surprises, giving us a powerful collection that fireworks even the bleakest nights with ardency and grace. Few contemporary poets risk singing such a singular compassion for the wounded world with this kind of inimitable musicality, intelligence, and intoxicating joy.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Ross Gay is a fresh voice in American poetry. His poems are fast-paced, carefully crafted with great attention to detail of those he writes about and the images that surround him. His poetry consists of beautiful metaphors and startling images.

Fox Chase Review

These poems are shout-outs to earth's abundance: the fruits, blooms, meals, insects, waters, conversations, trees, embraces, and helping hands—the taken-for-granted wonders that make life worth living, even in the face of death. Lyric and narrative, elegy and epithalamion, intoxicated and intoxicating—expansive, but breathlessly uttered, urgent. Ross Gay has much to say to you—yes, dear reader, you—and you definitely want to hear it.

Evie Shockley

In this bright book of life, Ross Gay lopes through the whole alphabet of emotions, from anger to zest. Merely considering the letter 'R,' for example, these poems are by turns racy, rollicking, reflective, rambunctious, raunchy, and rhapsodic. Praise and lamentation rub shoulders, along with elegy and elation, and every page is dazzling.

Scott Russell Sanders, author of Earth Works: Selected Essays

Almost no one has the faith Gay seems to have in poetry's ability to tap grace from the happenings of his life. . . . He looks to the act of writing as real alchemy, and death, disappointment, and inequity become honey in his hands.

Paris Review

Gay drops a third collection that follows through on its title's promise: these simple, joyful poems read like a litany of what's good in the world.

Publishers Weekly

Unabashed gratitude may be what Gay most wants us to notice and appreciate in his work, but getting-to-the-point is the most unabashed gesture of his project. Yet in his most vibrant poems, the getting-there is much more affecting than his destinations. The embracing, intimate sound of his speech is the pleasure.

On the Seawall