2023 Keynote Speakers Announced!

It is our absolute pleasure to announce that next year's keynote speakers at the festival are Ross Gay and Patrick Rosal.

Ross and Pat are two of the most acclaimed and exciting poets of their generation. They are also best friends.

They will be appearing together - sans moderator - at the Missouri Theatre on Friday, April 21, to kick off next year's festival. It's safe to say that this will be an Unbound keynote like no other. Ross and Pat will bring their extraordinary talents to the stage for an evening of joy, delight, poetry, music, wisdom, and friendship (and maybe some basketball.)

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. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, was published in October 2022.

Patrick Rosal is an interdisciplinary artist and the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems and Brooklyn Antediluvian, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. He has earned fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Senior Research Program. He is a Professor of English and inaugural Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers-Camden.

We can’t wait to welcome Ross and Pat to Columbia. Tickets – which, as always, will be free for everyone – will be available for reservation in early 2023. We promise you that this is an evening you will not want to miss.