Roxane Gay (born October 15, 1974)[1][2] is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017).
Gay is the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University.[3] She was an assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University for four years before joining Purdue University as an associate professor of English, where she was tenured.[4] In 2018, she left Purdue to become a visiting professor at Yale University.[5] She joined Rutgers in 2022.[4]
Gay was born in Omaha, Nebraska,[1] to Michael and Nicole Gay, both of Haitian descent.[10][11] Her mother was a homemaker and her father is owner of GDG Béton et Construction, a Haitian concrete company.[12][13] Gay is a cousin of Claudine Gay.[14] Gay was raised Catholic and spent her summers visiting family in Haiti.[15][16] She attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.[17] Gay began writing essays as a teenager,[18] with much of her early work being influenced by her experience with childhood sexual violence.[19] Her parents were relatively wealthy, supporting her through college and paying her rent until she was 30.[15]
Gay received a Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University in 2010.[23] She was inducted into the Omicron Delta Kappa Circle.[24] Her dissertation is titled Subverting the Subject Position: Toward a New Discourse About Students as Writers and Engineering Students as Technical Communicators.[25] Ann Brady served as her dissertation advisor.[25]
Career
After completing her Ph.D., Gay began her academic teaching career in 2010 at Eastern Illinois University,[26] where she was assistant professor of English. While at EIU, she was a contributing editor for Bluestem magazine,[27] and she also founded Tiny Hardcore Press. Gay worked at Eastern Illinois University until the end of the 2013–14 academic year. She was an associate professor of creative writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Purdue University from August 2014 until 2018.[7][28] Gay announced her departure from Purdue in October 2018, voicing concerns about the fairness of her compensation and noting Purdue had failed to address the issue.[29] For the spring of 2019 Gay was a visiting professor at Yale University.[29] In 2022, she joined Rutgers University, becoming the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies.[4]
Gay published a short-story collection, Ayiti (2011), then two books in 2014: the novel An Untamed State and the essay collection Bad Feminist (2014).[30] A Time review noted: "Gay's writing is simple and direct, but never cold or sterile. She directly confronts complex issues of identity and privilege, but it's always accessible and insightful."[31]
In May 2021, Gay announced she was starting a new imprint under Grove Atlantic, called Roxane Gay Books.[32] The first three books to be published under the imprint were announced in 2023.[33]
In 2023, Gay was one of more than 370 New York Times contributors to sign an open letter expressing "serious concerns about editorial bias" in the newspaper's reporting on transgender people. The letter characterized the reporting as using "an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language", and raised concerns regarding the newspaper's employment practices regarding trans contributors.[34][35][36] The following year, Gay published an essay in the New York Times decrying—despite the worthy tradition of Émile Zola's J'Accuse...! and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"—the open letter as a form that "Should End," as it allows writers to "hold fast to [their] deeply held beliefs without having to question them or grapple with doubt" and to "mitigate... helplessness with performance rather than practice."[37]
In 2014, Gay published her debut novel, An Untamed State, which centers around Mireille Duval Jameson, a Haitian-American woman who is kidnapped for ransom. The novel explores the interconnected themes of race, privilege, sexual violence, family, and the immigrant experience.[38]An Untamed State is often referred to as a fairy tale because of its structure and style, especially in reference to the opening sentence, "Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones," and the author's exploration of the American dream and courtship of Mireille's parents.[38][39]
Gay's collection of essays, Bad Feminist, was released in 2014 to widespread acclaim; it addresses both cultural and political issues, and became a New York Times best-seller.[41] A Time magazine reviewer dubbed Bad Feminist "a manual on how to be human," and called Gay the "gift that keeps on giving."[42] In a 2014 interview with the magazine, Gay explained her role as a feminist, and how it has influenced her writing: "In each of these essays, I'm very much trying to show how feminism influences my life for better or worse. It just shows what it's like to move through the world as a woman. It's not even about feminism per se, it's about humanity and empathy."[42]
In The Guardian, critic Kira Cochrane offered a similar assessment, "While online discourse is often characterised by extreme, polarised opinions, her writing is distinct for being subtle and discursive, with an ability to see around corners, to recognise other points of view while carefully advancing her own. In print, on Twitter and in person, Gay has the voice of the friend you call first for advice, calm and sane as well as funny, someone who has seen a lot and takes no prisoners."[19]
A group of feminist scholars and activists analyzed Gay's Bad Feminist for "Short Takes: Provocations on Public Feminism", an initiative of the feminist journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.[43]
In July 2016, Gay and poet Yona Harvey were announced as writers for Marvel Comics' World of Wakanda, a spin-off from the company's Black Panther title,[44] making them the first black women to be lead writers for Marvel.[45] Six issues of the comic were published.
Black Panther: World of Wakanda was hailed for its prominent portrayal of LGBTQ characters.[46] The comic followed the journey of two lovers Aneka and Ayo, who are former members of the Dora Milaje, the Black Panther's female security force.[47] The series follows the pair through multiple events, including the siege of their city by Thanos and the flooding of Wakanda by Namor.[46]
The series' cancellation was confirmed in June 2017 by Gay, just two days after the premiere of the trailer for the Black Panther movie. The last issue released in March 2017.[48] Marvel stated no official reason for the cancellation; however, feminist tech site The Mary Sue pointed to a connection with Marvel's knock against "diversity titles" and Marvel VP David Gabriel's statement that "people didn't want any more diversity. They didn't want female characters out there. That's what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don't know that that's really true, but that's what we saw in sales."[48]
In 2017, Gay published Difficult Women,[49][50][51] a collection of short stories that highlight women who have lives that differ from society's spectrum of a normal life. Each story follows a different character and her journey through either a traumatic experience or what makes her different from societal norms. The stories explore difficult and complex topics such as the intertwined relationship of sex and violence.
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body was released in June 2017.[52] Throughout, Gay discusses her experience with weight, body image, and building a positive relationship with food, particularly following her experience as a childhood victim of sexual violence. In fact, the book is divided into two sections, "The Before" and "The After" with the day of her rape being the dividing event. At 12 years old, Gay was lured into a cabin by her then-boyfriend and gang raped by him and his friends. She describes the event as the catalyst for her rapid weight gain and lifelong issues with both her body and sexuality. Gay described the book as a testimony of "what it's like to live in a world that tried to discipline unruly bodies."[53] The memoir received wide acclaim, praised by critics as "remarkable... ferociously honest,"[54] "arresting and candid,"[55] and "intimate and vulnerable."[56]
Following her national book tour in support of Hunger,[57][58] Gay said she found press around the book "to be very challenging, because people just don't know how to talk about fat."[59] In June 2017, Australian website Mamamia published an interview with Gay, revealing numerous details about how they prepared for her visit, which they described as a "logistical nightmare" because of the apparent consequence of her weight. On Twitter, Gay later described these preparations, including questions like "Will she fit into the office lift?" as both "cruel and humiliating".[60] In an interview with The New York Times, Gay stated the controversial event was "helpful, in that I think people get to see, in real time, what fat-phobia looks like and just how careless people can be in considering that fat people deserve dignity. So I suppose it's a useful example of why I wrote the book."[60]
Medium approached Gay in 2017 about the possibility of starting a "pop-up" magazine for the online publishing platform.[63] The magazine would specialize in cultural criticism and provide pay for writers including Gay's work in an editorial capacity.[63] The weekly online publication was produced with Medium's Deputy Editor Laura June and Managing Editor Kaitlyn Adams.[64][65] The first issue, published in late April 2019, featured essays by Athena Dixon and Grace Lavery.[64][65] In May 2019, Gay and Medium formally launched the new publication, Gay Magazine.[64][65] The short-lived journal was also referred to on Medium as GAY The Magazine—The Best Stories About Culture and Gay Mag. The first of the planned quarterly themed editions appeared in June 2019; public submissions were solicited in addition to the commissioned articles.[66] The final issue of Medium's Gay Magazine was themed 'Power' and was posted on April 3, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic's global lockdowns.[67]
In October 2019, when asked about Gay Magazine, Gay responded, "I'm doing what I always aim to do as an editor, which is to create a literary space for a range of voices who have something smart and interesting to say — and more importantly, to be able to pay them well. One of the biggest challenges of the digital media landscape is that the money is concentrated at the top and it rarely trickles down to the editors and writers, so to be able to have the support of Medium to create a publication — for however long it lasts – where we can pay people equitably and fairly is a really great thing. There is so much good writing going on out there, and I love being able to have a small hand in bringing that into the world."[68]
Following Gay and Wendy C. Ortiz's public accusation of plagiarism against Kate Elizabeth Russell on January 21, 2020,[69] on January 29, Gay Magazine published an essay alleging that Russell's then-forthcoming novel My Dark Vanessa shared "eerie story similarities" to Oritz's memoir Excavation, calling My Dark Vanessa "fictionalized, sensationalized."[70] The Associated Press reported that "[r]eviewers who looked at both books saw no evidence of plagiarism,"[71] and New York Magazine found the same.[69]) In response to these allegations, Oprah Winfrey dropped My Dark Vanessa from her influential book club.[72] Russell denied the allegations.[73]
Unruly Bodies
In April 2018, Gay partnered with the online publishing platform Medium to create a month-long pop-up magazine called Unruly Bodies. The magazine explored the relationship people share with their bodies, through an anthology of essays by 25 writers (including Gay herself).[74] Gay asked the 24 writers, "What does it mean to live in an unruly body?";[63] her book dealing with such issues, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, had been published in 2017. In a 2018 interview, Gay said, "I was surprised because I expected that I might get a lot of repetition, of [subject], not of style, but people wrote about all kinds of things. They wrote about gender, size, gun violence, wrestling, sex, ability. The range of issues from that one prompt, with the way that writers responded, was wonderful, and affirmed that I made very good choices in the writers that I approached."[63] In April 2018, over a year before the actual launch of the online magazine, "Gay Magazine" posted 25 articles in response to Gay's query under the heading Unruly Bodies; the writers were: Kaveh Akbar, Gabrielle Bellot, S. Bear Bergman, Keah Brown, Meghan Carpentier, Mike Copperman, Jennine Capó Crucet, Kelly Davio, Mensah Demary, Danielle Evans, Roxane Gay, Casey Hannan, Samantha Irby, Randa Jarrar, Kima Jones, Kiese Laymon, Carmen Maria Machado, Terese Mailhot, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Brian Oliu, Tracy Lynne Oliver, Larissa Pham, Matthew Salesses, Chelsea G. Summers and Your Fat Friend.[75]
The Banks
In December 2019, comic book publisher TKO Studios launched The Banks by Gay.[76]The Banks is a heist thriller about the most successful thieves in Chicago: the women of the Banks family. TKO Studios announced in 2020 a partnering with Macro (whose films have garnered nine Oscar nominations and one Oscar win for Viola Davis in Fences) to produce a film adaptation of the graphic novel. The screenplay is to be written by Gay, who is also serving as executive producer.[77]
The Audacity
In January 2021, Gay debuted her newsletter The Audacity, featuring essays by herself and emerging writers on a bi-weekly basis. It is also home to The Audacious Book Club, which features one book per month highlighting new works from underrepresented American writers. It started with Black Futures by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham, followed by Torrey Peters' debut novel Detransition, Baby in February. Also featured in 2021 are books by Brandon Hobson, Ashley C. Ford, and Anthony Veasna So.[78]
Other projects
Gay was the editor of The Butter, an online feminist writing site and sister site to The Toast, from November 2014 to August 2015.[79]The Butter featured writing on subjects including disability, literature, family, and music.[80]The Butter ceased publishing in August 2015, with Gay stating she was "simply stretched too thin."[80]
Gay was a U.S. Guardian columnist from 2015 to 2018.[81]
Gay was the guest judge and guest editor of The Masters Review annual fiction anthology in 2017.[82]
Gay was featured in a five-minute segment of This American Life on June 17, 2016, talking about her body, and how she is perceived as a fat person.[83]
Gay announced in January 2017 that she was pulling her book How to Be Heard, originally set to be published in 2018 by TED Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, due to her objections to alt-right journalist Milo Yiannopoulos receiving a book deal from another Simon & Schuster imprint.[84]
In 2022, Gay partnered with the stationery company Baron Fig on a notebook designed to aid consumers' writing processes.[93][94] She revealed in 2023 that she has been experiencing writer's block for five years.[95]
Awards and honors
In 2020, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first LGBTQ Pride parade, Queerty named Gay among the fifty heroes "leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people".[96][97] She was also included in the 2022 Fast Company Queer 50 list.[98]
Much of Gay's written work deals with the analysis and deconstruction of feminist and racial issues through the lens of her personal experiences with race, gender identity, and sexuality.[106]
Susan Charlotte Faludi is an American feminist, journalist, and author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, Inc., a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee commended for depicting the "human costs of high finance". She was also awarded the Kirkus Prize in 2016 for In the Darkroom, which was also a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in biography.
Barbara Smith is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation. She has a twin sister, Beverly Smith, who is also a lesbian feminist activist and writer.
Amandla Stenberg is an American actress. She began acting as a child in the film Colombiana (2011). She had supporting roles in the action film The Hunger Games (2012), the supernatural series Sleepy Hollow (2013–2014) and the sitcom Mr. Robinson (2015). As an adult, Stenberg had starring roles in the romance film Everything, Everything (2017), the drama film The Hate U Give (2018), the comedy horror film Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), and the series The Acolyte (2024).
The Rumpus is an online literary magazine founded by Stephen Elliott, and launched on January 20, 2009. The site features interviews, book reviews, essays, comics, and critiques of creative culture as well as original fiction and poetry. The site runs two subscription-based book clubs and two subscription-based letters programs, Letters in the Mail and Letters for Kids.
Yona Harvey is an American poet and assistant professor at University of Pittsburgh. She won the 2014 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also an author of Marvel Comics' World of Wakanda, becoming one of the first two black women writing for Marvel.
An Untamed State is the debut novel of writer Roxane Gay, first published in 2014 by Grove Atlantic.
Wendy C. Ortiz is an American essayist, creative nonfiction writer, fiction writer, psychotherapist, and poet.
Bad Feminist: Essays is a 2014 collection of essays by cultural critic, novelist and professor Roxane Gay. Bad Feminist explores being a feminist while loving things that could seem at odds with feminist ideology. Gay's essays engage pop culture and her personal experiences, covering topics such as the Sweet Valley High series, Django Unchained, and Gay's own upbringing as a Haitian-American.
Nicole Cliffe is a Canadian writer living in Utah, who co-founded and co-edited the website The Toast with Daniel Lavery.
The Dora Milaje are fictional characters appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. They are a team of women who serve as special forces for the fictional African nation of Wakanda.
Black Panther: World of Wakanda is a comic book series and a spin-off from the Marvel Comics Black Panther title. It published six issues before being canceled. The series was primarily written by Roxane Gay, with poet Yona Harvey contributing a story to the first issue. Alitha E. Martinez drew the majority of the art for the series, for which Afua Richardson contributed cover art to the first five issues, as well as art for a short story in the first issue. Gay and Harvey became the first two black women to author a series for Marvel; counting Martinez and Richardson, upon its debut the series itself was helmed entirely by black women. Ta-Nehisi Coates served as a consultant for the series.
Alitha E. Martinez is an American comic book artist best known for her work on for Marvel Comics's Iron Man, the Heroes webcomics, and DC's Batgirl. Over the course of her career she has worked for all the major comic book publishers, including Marvel, DC Comics, Image Comics, and Archie Comics.
Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is a 2017 memoir by Roxane Gay, published on June 13, 2017, by HarperCollins in New York, New York.
Ijeoma Oluo is an American writer. She is the author of So You Want to Talk About Race and has written for The Guardian,Jezebel, The Stranger, Medium, and The Establishment, where she was also an editor-at-large.
Girl, Woman, Other is the eighth novel by Bernardine Evaristo. Published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, it follows the lives of 12 characters in the United Kingdom over the course of several decades. The book was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments.
Keah Brown is an American disability rights activist, author, journalist, and writer. She is also known as the creator of the hashtag #DisabledAndCute, which first went viral in February 2017 and caught the attention of such celebrities as Sophia Bush and Brie Larson. Brown has been featured on 3rd Hour of Today to discuss her first published book, The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love, with Me.
Morgan Jerkins is an American writer and editor. Her debut book, This Will Be My Undoing (2018), a collection of nonfiction essays, was a New York Times bestseller. Her second book, Wandering in Strange Lands, her memoir, was released in August 2020. She is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University.
Jude Ellison Sady Doyle is an American feminist author.
Aubrey Hirsch is a writer and illustrator from Cleveland, Ohio, who has published personal essays and comics in the New York Times,Time Magazine, Vox, The Nib, and elsewhere. She published a short story collection, Why We Never Talk About Sugar, in 2013, and her essays and stories have been published in anthologies and collections, including Roxane Gay's Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, and Pittsburgh Noir. Hirsch is a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Creative Writing and a 2022 Sustainable Arts Foundation award winner for graphic memoir.
References
1 2 Gay, Roxane. "Once, I Was Pretty". Freerange Nonfiction. Archived from the original on November 18, 2013. Retrieved April 9, 2016. ...a record of my birth in the Omaha World Herald, printed on October 28, 1974, thirteen days after my birthday. ... My name is spelled correctly on my birth certificate, with one 'n'...
↑ Gay, Roxane (2017). Hunger: A Memoir of (my) Body (Kindle ebook; 1sted.). New York City: HarperCollins. p.282.
↑ Gordon, Laura. "2022-2025: Dr. Roxane Gay". Rutgers University:: Department of Women's and Gender Studies. Retrieved August 26, 2024.
↑ "Confident Guided Journal". Baron Pig. Retrieved September 7, 2023. Everything you need to organize your ideas, plan out details big and small, and get to writing. In collaboration with Roxane Gay.
↑ "Roxane Gay". Purdue College of Liberal Arts. Archived from the original on August 23, 2017. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
↑ Gay, Roxane (October 11, 2015). "roxane gay". Twitter. Archived from the original on April 15, 2019. Retrieved October 12, 2015. It's national coming out day. I am bisexual af. I am also a libra.
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