How to Love the World

An Indie Poetry Bestseller! What the world needs now featuring poems from inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith and more. More and more people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others. The work of these poets captures the beauty, pleasure, and connection readers hunger for. How to Love the World, which contains new works by Ted Kooser, Mark Nepo, and Jane Hirshfield, invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere. With pauses for stillness and invitations for writing and reflection throughout, as well as reading group questions and topics for discussion in the back, this book can be used to facilitate discussion in a classroom or in any group setting.

Author Biography

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.