Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay (born October 15, 1974, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.) gained widespread acclaim in 2014 for her book Bad Feminist, a collection of essays that reflect on her personal experiences, pop culture, and hot-button social issues. A prolific writer with a witty and empathetic literary style and a devoted fan base, she has also published works of fiction and memoir, served as an editor for various literary journals, and written an opinion column for The New York Times.

Early life and education

Gay was born to Haitian immigrants who had moved to the United States when they were 19 years old. Her mother, Nicole Gay, was a homemaker, and her father, Michael Gay, was a civil engineer whose work took the family to different states, including Colorado, Illinois, Virginia, and New Jersey, throughout Roxane’s childhood. She was their eldest child, followed by two brothers, Joel and Michael. They were raised Roman Catholic, and she would later describe her parents as strict but loving. By her own account, she started writing stories when she was four years old.

As a teenager, Gay attended Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive boarding school in New Hampshire. After graduating in 1992, she attended Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, but dropped out at the beginning of her junior year to pursue a relationship with an older man she had met online. Gay moved across the country without letting her family know. Her parents were able to track her down about a year later, and she soon returned to the family home, then in Nebraska, and resumed her education. She eventually completed her undergraduate degree (1999) through a residency program at Vermont College, Montpelier, a nonmilitary school that was then part of Norwich University, in Northfield, Vermont. Gay earned a master’s degree in creative writing (2004) from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, followed by a doctorate (2010) in rhetoric and technical communication from Michigan Technological University (MTU) in Houghton.

(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)

Early literary pursuits

At MTU, Gay helped launch PANK, an independent literary magazine run by M. Bartley Seigel, a professor of creative writing at the university. By this time, Gay had begun publishing her own short stories and essays, as well as erotica written under various pseudonyms. In 2011 she published her first collection of short stories, Ayiti, which explores the experience of the Haitian diaspora. Apart from writing, Gay was involved in the independent literary community, serving as the essays editor at The Rumpus, a volunteer-run online literary magazine that was launched in 2009, and founding Tiny Hardcore Press, a small publishing company. For the former, she wrote a poignant essay, “What We Hunger For,” on her experience of being gang-raped at age 12 by her schoolmates.

As an essayist, fiction writer, and editor, Gay brought an intersectional perspective to literature. Her work drew on her experience as a queer Black feminist woman living in relatively small, isolated communities in the Midwest. Her short story “North Country”—first published in 2011 in the literary magazine Hobart and then selected for the 2012 edition of The Best American Short Stories—tells of a young Black woman who works as an engineer and an academic. The character falls into a complicated relationship with a white logger in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where nearly everyone she meets wrongly assumes that she comes from Detroit. Gay explained to NPR in a 2017 interview, “When you’re Black in Michigan, people generally assume you’re from Detroit, as if that’s the only place where Black people in Michigan come from. I was asked that question so often while I was living up north that it just became hilarious. So I wanted to make reference to that.” Common themes in her writing include feminism, identity, and pop culture. Gay also frequently wrote about sexual violence and rape culture, drawing upon her experience of being sexually assaulted.

Bad Feminist and other writings

Between 2012 and 2014 Gay began writing essays in such publications as Salon, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Her breakthrough came in 2014, when she published the novel An Untamed State, about a woman who is kidnapped while visiting family in Haiti, and the best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist. Both books received accolades from critics, and Bad Feminist in particular highlights Gay’s ability to intertwine cultural commentary and deeply personal experiences in a voice that is both accessible and provocative. The book’s title came from her self-professed love for many songs, books, films, and television shows that contradict some interpretations of feminist principles.

Black Panther: World of Wakanda

From 2016 to 2017 Gay collaborated on Black Panther: World of Wakanda, a comic book series from Marvel Comics, with fellow writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Yona Harvey and artists Afua Richardson and Alitha E. Martinez. She and Harvey were the first Black women to write for Marvel. The series garnered praise for its depiction of LGBTQ characters, winning the award for outstanding comic book at the GLAAD Media Awards presentation in 2018.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s 2018 Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

Hunger, Not That Bad, and other works

In 2017 Gay published Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, which details her experiences as a large woman, her relationship with food, and her struggles with body image. The book was another bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle finalist for best autobiography. That same year, she released her second collection of short stories, Difficult Women. In 2018 Gay received a Guggenheim fellowship for creative nonfiction and served as editor of the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. Her projects in 2020 include the graphic novel The Sacrifice of Darkness (written with Tracy Lynne Oliver), the short-story collection Graceful Burdens, and The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, which she edited. In 2023 Gay published Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticisms, and Minding Other People’s Business, a collection of some of her most renowned essays and opinion pieces.

Podcast, newsletter, and other projects

Gay served as a professor of English or women’s studies at various universities, including Eastern Illinois University in Charleston; Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana; Yale University; and Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Her podcast Hear to Slay, a collaboration with American author and critic Tressie McMillan Cottom, features interviews with high-profile women, such as American politician, lawyer, activist, and writer Stacey Abrams and American director, producer, and writer Ava DuVernay. Gay’s weekly newsletter, The Audacity, which showcases her own writing as well as essays by emerging writers, debuted in 2021. That same year, she introduced Roxane Gay Books, an imprint of the publisher Grove Atlantic in New York City.