In which Ross Gay, poet of Be Holding; Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and author of the New York Times Bestselling collection of essays The Book of Delights, discusses “Joy as the rightful subject of our literary concerns or inquiry.”

In which Caki Wilkinson personifies hope and muses, “Hope is a character and things are not going well for her. I was thinking about Emily Dickinson, like what is the 2020 version of Emily Dickinson’s ‘Hope is the thing with feathers?’. Definitely not a bird.”