How to Love the World

James Crews is the editor of the best-selling anthologies, The Path to Kindness and How to Love the World, which has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, in the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post. His poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and The Christian Century. He collaborated with former US poet laureate Ted Kooser on “American Life in Poetry,” which reaches millions of readers across the world. Crews holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a PhD in writing and literature from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He teaches poetry at the University at Albany and lives with his husband in Shaftsbury, Vermont. Ross Gay is the New York Times bestselling author of the essay collections The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy and four books of poetry. His Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Be Holding won the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. Gay is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.