Roxane Gay was born in the United States in 1974. She completed her undergraduate degree at Vermont College and also earned a master's degree with an emphasis in creative writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2010, Gay received a PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University.
From 2010 until 2014, Gay was an assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. She was an associate professor of creative writing in the MFA program at Purdue University from August 2014 until 2018. In 2018, Gay served as a visiting professor at Yale University.
Gay’s work garners international acclaim for its reflective, no-holds-barred exploration of feminism and social criticism. Her collection of essays, Bad Feminist, is considered the quintessential exploration of modern feminism. Her debut novel, An Untamed State, was long listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. In 2017, Professor Gay released her memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, as well as a collection of short stories titled Difficult Women.
Roxane Gay delivered the Beatty Lecture on October 11, 2018, titled "Difficult Women, Bad Feminists and Unruly Bodies".
Top image: Joni Dufour
