Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay is one of the most prolific and distinctive voices in contemporary American letters — an essayist, cultural critic, fiction writer, editor, and memoirist whose work spans a remarkable range of genres and subjects. Born on October 15, 1974, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Haitian immigrant parents, Gay grew up largely in the Midwest and has spoken and written extensively about the ways that her identity — as a Black woman, a fat woman, a queer woman, and the daughter of immigrants — has shaped her experience and her writing.
She holds a Ph.D. in rhetoric and technical communication from Michigan Technological University and has held academic positions at Eastern Illinois University, Purdue University, and Yale, among others. Her breakthrough came with the 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist, a witty, candid, and wide-ranging series of pieces on pop culture, gender, race, and the contradictions of trying to be a good feminist in a complicated world. The book became a bestseller and established Gay as a major public intellectual and cultural voice.
Her novel An Untamed State (2014) deals with kidnapping and sexual violence in Haiti. Her 2017 memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is a searingly personal account of her relationship with her body following a gang rape she experienced at age twelve, tracing the ways that trauma is written into flesh and the limits of self-help narratives. The book won the Pen/Jean Stein Book Award and was widely recognized as a landmark work in the literature of the body and trauma.
Gay has contributed to The New York Times, The Guardian, Salon, Buzzfeed, and many other outlets. She has also written for Marvel Comics and has been a regular presence in public conversations about race, gender, sexuality, and the role of literature in political life. She is the author of the short story collection Difficult Women (2017) and continues to be one of the most sought-after voices in American literary culture.
