Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay
Reading at Fall for the Book, 2014
Born	(1974-10-15) October 15, 1974 Nebraska, United States
Occupation	Professor, writer
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Michigan Technological University Phillips Exeter Academy
Genres	Novel, short story, criticism
Website
RoxaneGay.com

Roxane Gay (born October 15, 1974) is an American feminist writer, professor, editor and commentator. She is an associate professor of English at Purdue University, contributing op-ed writer at The New York Times, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, essays editor for The Rumpus, and co-editor of PANK, a nonprofit literary arts collective.

Education

Gay holds a doctoral degree in rhetoric and technical communication from Michigan Technological University. The title of her dissertation is Subverting the subject position: toward a new discourse about students as writers and engineering students as technical communicators.

She attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

Career

After completing her Ph.D., Gay began her academic teaching career in Fall 2010 at Eastern Illinois University, where she was assistant professor of English. While at EIU, in addition to her teaching duties she was a contributing editor for Bluestem magazine and she also founded Tiny Hardcore Press. Gay worked at Eastern Illinois University until the end of the 2013-2014 academic year, taking a job in August 2014 at Purdue University as associate professor of creative writing.

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. She is the author of the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), and Hunger (forthcoming 2016). She also edited the book Girl Crush: Women's Erotic Fantasies. In addition to her regular contributions to Salon and the now defunct HTMLGiant, her writing has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, Bookforum, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation and The New York Times Book Review.

Bad Feminist

Gay’s most recent published work, Bad Feminist, is a creative selection of essays which tackle a range of topics from competitive Scrabble playing to advice on how to acknowledge privilege. Bad Feminist, which addresses both cultural and political issues, became a New York Times best-seller. Time magazine dubbed Bad Feminist “a manual on how to be human” and called Gay the “gift that keeps on giving.” 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.”

Hunger

Her latest book, Hunger, is to be released in June of 2016. Hunger will be about Gay's experience with weight, body image and building a positive relationship with food. In an interview with Elite Daily Gay described this book as a testimony of “what it’s like to live in a world that tried to discipline unruly bodies.”

Reception

Gay's publication of the novel An Untamed State and essay collection Bad Feminist in the summer of 2014 led Time Magazine to declare, "Let this be the year of Roxane Gay." The magazine noted of her inclusive style: "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." In the United Kingdom's 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." 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.

Personal life

Gay was born in Omaha, Nebraska and her family moved several times in her childhood. Struggling to make friends, she turned to books instead. She began writing essays as a teenager; her work has been greatly influenced by a sexual assault she experienced at age 12. She is of Haitian descent, and writes about how her Haitian American upbringing affected her in her book of essays, Bad Feminist.

Gay is also a competitive Scrabble player in the U.S.

She is openly bisexual.

Bibliography

Fiction

• Ayiti (Artistically Declined Press, 2011) ISBN 9781450776714
• An Untamed State (Grove Atlantic, 2014) ISBN 9780802122513

Non-fiction

• Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial, August 5, 2014) ISBN 9780062282712
• Hunger

External links

• Official website
• Roxane Gay at TED
  • "Confessions of a bad feminist" (TEDWomen 2015)