Award-Winning Poet Ross Gay to be featured in Wooster’s Mortensen Lecture

Ross Gay, critically acclaimed author and essayist, will give The College of Wooster’s Peter Mortensen Lecture on Thursday, Sept. 25 at 7 p.m. at McGaw Chapel (340 E University St.). The lecture is free and open to the public.

Selected as the first-year reading for Wooster’s Class of 2029, Gay’s non-fiction memoir, Inciting Joy, encompasses a central theme: unity through care and its consequential joy, especially throughout life’s unavoidable hardships. In 2022, the novel was awarded the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Memoir/Nonfiction for its literary merit and was praised by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón for its striking presence and juxtaposition of joy and sorrow.

Gay was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and is currently a professor of English at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He has taught poetry, art, and literature at various higher-education institutions, including Lafayette College, Montclair University, and Drew University. As of 2025, Gay’s poems have appeared in literary magazines and journals including The American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Atlanta Review, while his essays have been published in The Paris Review.

The Peter Mortensen Endowed Lecture Fund was established in 2006 with a gift from Peter Mortensen, class of 1956, with gratitude for the contribution of The College of Wooster to the success and happiness of four generations of the Mortensen family. Income from the fund is used to support one or more public lectures and/or performances related to the First-Year Seminar, or for similar purposes directly related to the academic program.

Posted in News on September 15, 2025.