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Roxane Gay (born October 15, 1974) is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017).
Gay is the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She was an assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University for four years before joining Purdue University as an associate professor of English, where she was tenured. In 2018, she left Purdue to become a visiting professor at Yale University. She joined Rutgers in 2022.
Gay is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, essays editor for The Rumpus, and the editor for Gay Mag, which was founded in partnership with Medium.
After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, Gay began her undergraduate studies at Yale University, but dropped out in her junior year to pursue a relationship in Arizona. She completed her undergraduate degree at Vermont College at Norwich University, and also received a master's degree with an emphasis in creative writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Gay received a Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University in 2010. She was inducted into the Omicron Delta Kappa Circle. Her dissertation is titled Subverting the Subject Position: Toward a New Discourse About Students as Writers and Engineering Students as Technical Communicators. Ann Brady served as her dissertation advisor.
Gay published a short-story collection, Ayiti (2011), then two books in 2014: the novel An Untamed State and the essay collection Bad Feminist (2014). A Time review noted: "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 May 2021, Gay announced she was starting a new imprint under Grove Atlantic, called Roxane Gay Books. The first three books to be published under the imprint were announced in 2023.
In 2023, Gay was one of more than 370 New York Times contributors to sign an open letter expressing "serious concerns about editorial bias" in the newspaper's reporting on transgender people. The letter characterized the reporting as using "an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language", and raised concerns regarding the newspaper's employment practices regarding trans contributors. The following year, Gay published an essay in the New York Times decrying—despite the worthy tradition of Émile Zola's J'Accuse...! and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"—the open letter as a form that "Should End," as 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."
The Guardian review by Attica Locke calling it "a breathtaking debut novel," and The Washington Post crediting it as "a smart, searing novel."
In 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 .
Black Panther: World of Wakanda was hailed for its prominent portrayal of LGBT characters. The comic followed the journey of two lovers Aneka and Ayo, who are former members of the Dora Milaje, the Black Panther's female security force. The series follows the pair through multiple events, including the siege of their city by Thanos and the flooding of Wakanda by Namor.
The series' cancellation was confirmed in June 2017 by Gay, just two days after the premiere of the trailer for the Black Panther movie. The last issue was released in March 2017. Marvel stated no official reason for the cancellation; however, feminist tech site The Mary Sue pointed to a connection with Marvel's knock against "diversity titles" and Marvel VP David Gabriel's statement that "people didn't want any more diversity. They didn't want female characters out there. That's what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don't know that that's really true, but that's what we saw in sales."
She also wrote frankly about how she became morbidly obese and how society views her. She wrote that she became obese when she was in high school and is still to this day, despite decades of trying to lose weight. She explores a society and culture that shames her for her weight. She cites specifically the struggles she endures being obese, such as not being able to find clothes that fit her and the inability to sit in certain chairs. She described a publishing event in which she sat and broke a chair, and the public humiliation she felt. She stated in an interview with Vice, that she has often been misgendered due to her weight. She added, "Being fat means you aren’t desirable. So as a woman, you are basically degendered. People also often read fat bodies as male."
Following her national book tour in support of Hunger, Gay said she found press around the book "to be very challenging, because people just don't know how to talk about fat." In June 2017, Australian website Mamamia published an interview with Gay, revealing numerous details about how they prepared for her visit, which they described as a "logistical nightmare" because of the apparent consequence of her weight. On Twitter, Gay later described these preparations, including questions like "Will she fit into the office lift?" as both "cruel and humiliating". In an interview with The New York Times, Gay stated the controversial event was "helpful, in that I think people get to see, in real time, what fat-phobia looks like and just how careless people can be in considering that fat people deserve dignity. So I suppose it's a useful example of why I wrote the book."
At a February 2019 speaking event at USC, in the Q&A, supporters of the Revolutionary Communist Party criticized co-speaker Amanda Nguyen's work in the U.S. government during the War on Terror; in response, Gay defended Nguyen on Twitter.
In October 2019, when asked about Gay Magazine, Gay responded, "I'm doing what I always aim to do as an editor, which is to create a literary space for a range of voices who have something smart and interesting to say — and more importantly, to be able to pay them well. One of the biggest challenges of the digital media landscape is that the money is concentrated at the top and it rarely trickles down to the editors and writers, so to be able to have the support of Medium to create a publication — for however long it lasts – where we can pay people equitably and fairly is a really great thing. There is so much good writing going on out there, and I love being able to have a small hand in bringing that into the world."
Following Gay and Wendy C. Ortiz's public accusation of plagiarism against Kate Elizabeth Russell on January 21, 2020, on January 29, Gay Magazine published an essay alleging that Russell's then-forthcoming novel My Dark Vanessa shared "eerie story similarities" to Oritz's memoir Excavation, calling My Dark Vanessa "fictionalized, sensationalized." The Associated Press reported that "reviewers who looked at both books saw no evidence of plagiarism," and New York Magazine found the same.) In response to these allegations, Oprah Winfrey dropped My Dark Vanessa from her influential book club. Russell denied the allegations.
In April 2018, over a year before the actual launch of the online magazine, "Gay Magazine" posted 25 articles in response to Gay's query under the heading Unruly Bodies; the writers were: Kaveh Akbar, Gabrielle Bellot, S. Bear Bergman, Keah Brown, Megan Carpentier, Mike Copperman, Jennine Capó Crucet, Kelly Davio, Mensah Demary, Danielle Evans, Roxane Gay, Casey Hannan, Samantha Irby, Randa Jarrar, Kima Jones, Kiese Laymon, Carmen Maria Machado, Terese Mailhot, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Brian Oliu, Tracy Lynne Oliver, Larissa Pham, Matthew Salesses, Chelsea G. Summers and Aubrey Gordon.
Gay was a U.S. Guardian columnist from 2015 to 2018.
Gay was the guest judge and guest editor of The Masters Review annual fiction anthology in 2017.
Gay was featured in a five-minute segment of This American Life on June 17, 2016, talking about her body and how she is perceived as a fat person.
Gay announced in January 2017 that she was pulling her book How to Be Heard, originally set to be published in 2018 by TED Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, due to her objections to alt-right journalist Milo Yiannopoulos receiving a book deal from another Simon & Schuster imprint.
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. She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Gay was featured in the 2016 book In the Company of Women: Inspiration and Advice from over 100 Makers, Artists, and Entrepreneurs.
In July 2019, Gay launched a book club on HBO's Vice News Tonight.
In 2019, Gay partnered with Tressie McMillan Cottom to create a black feminism podcast titled Hear To Slay, which featured influential black women as guests, including Stacey Abrams, Gabrielle Union, and Ava DuVernay. In 2022, the podcast was relaunched as The Roxane Gay Agenda.
In 2022, Gay partnered with the stationery company Baron Fig on a notebook designed to aid consumers' writing processes. She revealed in 2023 that she has been experiencing writer's block for five years.
In 2025, it was announced that Gay and her partner Debbie Millman were the new owners of The Rumpus.
In January 2018, Gay revealed that she had undergone sleeve gastrectomy, a bariatric surgery that removes 75–85% of the stomach. She is tall.
| — | Lambda Literary Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Literature | Winner | |
| Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Literature | Winner | ||
| World of Wakanda | Eisner Award for Best Limited Series | Winner | |
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