The Warren Community College Visiting Authors Series resumes on Tuesday, April 12, with Ross Gay and Patrick Rosal, who will exchange poems, each playing off the other, in an online event that host and WCC professor BJ Ward calls “Poetic Reciprocity.” 

This unique duet-reading, which can be accessed through the link found below, begins at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Gay, pictured above, is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His poem, Be Holding, was released from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September of 2020. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.

Rosal is the author of five full-length poetry collections including, most recently, The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems. Brooklyn Antediluvian (2016) won the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize for best book of poetry and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry. Boneshepherds (2011) was named a small press highlight by the National Book Critics Circle and a notable book by the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of My American Kundiman (2006), and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003). Pat has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Research Scholar program. He teaches at Rutgers-Camden.

Together, they are co-founding editors (with Karissa Chen) of Some Call It Ballin’, a literary sports magazine.

The Visiting Authors Series is supported by a grant from the Warren County Division of Cultural & Heritage Affairs. All physical site facilities comply with ADA regulations and are fully accessible. Sign language interpretation for any VAS event is available with two weeks’ notice.

To attend the reading, please follow this link: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/773927965152904463. After the simple registration process, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about attending the virtual reading.

Warren Community College, located at 475 Route 57 West in Washington offers students the option of earning an Associate of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, the first and only degree of its kind in New Jersey and a member program of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). For more information about the A.F.A. in Creative Writing, please visit  http://www.warren.edu/creative-writing/ or call 908-835-WCCC.