Sports, Annotated

On Friday, September 30th, Bookforum held an online Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend event, “Sports Annotated,” with poet Ross Gay, critic Lindsay Zoladz, novelist Miranda Popkey, and author Thomas Beller. Based on our summer issue, the conversation, introduced by Bookforum editor Michael Miller, covered the centrality of sports to culture and the ways in which our favorite players and teams shape who we are.

Thomas Beller has written for many publications, including the New Yorker, n+1, and Bookforum. He was a founding editor at Open City magazine, and the creator of Mr Beller’s Neighborhood. His books include J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, How to Be a Man, and the forthcoming Lost in the Game: A Book about Basketball, which will be published in November 2022  by Duke University Press.

Lindsay Zoladz is a freelance critic, reporter, and essayist living in Brooklyn. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Bookforum, and other publications, and is currently working on a book about female geniuses. Her piece in Bookforum’s summer issue is about her transformation into a Mets fan after losing faith in her childhood baseball team, the Phillies. 

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry, including 2020’s Be Holding, winner of the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, will be released in October 2022 by Algonquin Books. In the summer issue, he wrote a diaristic piece detailing observations he has made about aggression, writing poetry, and collaboration by playing basketball.

Miranda Popkey is the author of the 2020 novel Topics of Conversation, published by Knopf. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review Daily, and the New Yorker online, among other outlets. She writes about sports and sports movies for Fran magazine. In Bookforum’s sports issue, she wrote an appreciation of the Boston Celtics guard Marcus Smart.