She began her academic teaching career at Eastern Illinois University, and whilst there she founded the Tiny Hardcore publishing company. Her education included time spent studying at the world-famous Yale University, and she holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and a PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communications.
In 2016, she and poet Yona Harvey became the first black women to become lead writers for Marvel, authoring the well-received comic book series Black Panther: World of Wakanda, which won an Eisner Award for Best Limited Series. Her autobiography, Hunger, won the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Her debut novel, 2014’s An Untamed State, was awarded the NAACP Image Prize for Outstanding Literary Work.
She is best known for award-winning bestsellers such as Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, and Hunger. Doors open at 6:45 pm.Ĭo-sponsored by Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies the English Department the Afro-American Cultural Center and the Women Faculty Forum.Roxane Gay is a hugely gifted and highly influential American author, professor, journalist, and social commentator. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts.įree and open to the public.
A finalist for the National Book Award, “Citizen” also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. She is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.Ĭlaudia Rankine, the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale and a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, will lead a Q&A with Roxane following the reading. Claudia is the author of five collections of poetry, including “Citizen: An American Lyric” and “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” two plays including “Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue” numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including “The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.” For “Citizen,” Rankine won the Forward Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (“Citizen” was also nominated in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a double nominee), the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award. Her writing appears 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, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. Roxane has authored the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. This semester she is a Presidential Visiting Fellow and is teaching an undergraduate seminar on writing trauma. Roxane Gay is a prominent journalist and author on feminism, race, gender, and their intersections.
Join us for an evening with Roxane Gay as she reads selections from her work.