Current Book
Why We Chose Inciting Joy
Following a comprehensive review process, which included University librarians, staff, faculty, and students, the selection committee chose Inciting Joy by Ross Gay. The committee was guided by the Common Read program’s established criteria: accessibility, thematic relevance, cross-disciplinary potential, and capacity to foster meaningful community engagement.
Moving between deeply personal stories and broad reflections on loss, delight, community, and everyday human interaction, Gay examines joy not as a naive optimism, but as something intertwined with shared experience. His writing encourages us to slow down, notice one another more carefully, and consider the ways people create meaning and belonging in complicated times.
At a moment when many students are balancing the excitement and opportunities of college with navigating uncertainty, division, pressure, and rapid social change, the committee was drawn to Inciting Joy. For a university community, essays create space for conversations about themes that resonate powerfully within college life, and the broader world students are preparing to shape.
