We are absolutely thrilled to announce that we will be welcoming not one, but two, writers to participate in the Unbound Book Festival keynote event on Friday, April 21. They are two of the most acclaimed and exciting poets of their generation. They are also best friends.

They are Ross Gay and Patrick Rosal.

This will be an Unbound keynote like no other. Ross and Pat will bring their extraordinary talents to the stage of the Missouri Theatre 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 and 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.

Books by both authors will be available for purchase at the event and both authors will be signing after the talk.