Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. She has taught at Eastern Illinois University, Purdue University, Yale University, and currently holds the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, on October 15, 1974, to Haitian parents Michael and Nicole Gay, she was raised Catholic and spent summers in Haiti. Her father owns a Haitian concrete company, and her mother was a homemaker. She is a cousin of Harvard professor Claudine Gay. Gay attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where she began writing essays as a teenager, influenced by her experience with childhood sexual violence. Her parents were relatively wealthy and supported her financially through college and until age 30.

After Exeter, Gay started undergraduate studies at Yale but dropped out in her junior year to follow a relationship to Arizona. She completed her bachelor's degree at Vermont College at Norwich University, then earned a master's in creative writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She received a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University in 2010, with a dissertation titled *Subverting the Subject Position: Toward a New Discourse About Students as Writers and Engineering Students as Technical Communicators*, advised by Ann Brady.

Gay began her academic career in 2010 as an assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, where she also served as a contributing editor for *Bluestem* magazine and founded Tiny Hardcore Press. She left EIU after the 2013–14 academic year and became an associate professor of creative writing in Purdue University's MFA program from August 2014 until 2018. She left Purdue in October 2018, citing concerns about unfair compensation and the university's failure to address the issue. In spring 2019, she was a visiting professor at Yale, and in 2022 she joined Rutgers.

Her published works include the short-story collection *Ayiti* (2011), the novel *An Untamed State* (2014), the essay collection *Bad Feminist* (2014), the short-story collection *Difficult Women* (2017), and the memoir *Hunger* (2017). *Bad Feminist* became a *New York Times* bestseller. A *Time* review described her writing as "simple and direct, but never cold or sterile," noting that she "directly confronts complex issues of identity and privilege, but it's always accessible and insightful." *An Untamed State*, about a Haitian-American woman kidnapped for ransom, was called "a breathtaking debut novel" by *The Guardian* and "a smart, searing novel" by *The Washington Post*.

Gay is a contributing opinion writer for *The New York Times*, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, essays editor for *The Rumpus*, and editor of *Gay Mag*, launched in partnership with Medium. In 2021, she announced a new imprint under Grove Atlantic called Roxane Gay Books, with its first three titles announced in 2023.

In 2023, Gay was among more than 370 *New York Times* contributors who signed an open letter expressing "serious concerns about editorial bias" in the paper's reporting on transgender people, citing "an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language" and concerns about employment practices. The following year, she published an essay in the *Times* arguing that the open letter form "should end," noting that while it has a worthy tradition (citing Émile Zola and Martin Luther King Jr.), 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."