MDC Events

The 2023 Big Read Miami keynote address features award-winning poet, educator, and community gardener Ross Gay on this year’s featured title, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. In his award-winning poetry collection, Gay demonstrates the practice of gratitude while never losing sight of the loss that animates it. Animated by what he has called the “discipline of gratitude,” the collection considers sorrow’s potential, grounded in the rhythms and abundance of the natural world: the compost that gives way to rich soil, the decay that reveals seeds, the branches that must be trimmed to make room for new growth.

Ross Gay will be in conversation with Mrs. Patricia J. Braynon, Chairperson of the board for the Black Archives and Historic Lyric Theater, and Miami-Dade County Poetry Ambassador Nicole Tallman on the themes found in the book and the importance of poetry and literature in the civic life of a community. The event will include a welcome and short vision statement by Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava about the County’s commitment to community gardens and farms and food security.

Free copies of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude will be distributed to attendees while supplies last.