Roxane Gay Archive
The Incantatory Effect of Repetition in Memoir
Roxane Gay’s Hunger and Melissa Febos’s Abandon Me both deal with longing to be understood and fighting the instinct to try to disappear. Both also use repetition as a literary device to achieve a lyricism, rhythm, and resonance that build power.
Fake News, Real Stories
Literary fiction in 2017 expounded on the gritty realities that the Trump Administration obscures. Socially relevant fiction this year resonated with readers hungry for truth.
Review: HUNGER, A MEMOIR OF (MY) BODY by Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay is America’s favorite "bad feminist." She is often read as a black feminist, but her Haitian roots rarely get more than a passing mention. And yet, Haiti is the unseen backdrop to Gay’s memoir Hunger: a fierce, black, female, fat narrative.
Not Like One of the Family: Novels of Dignity and Domestic Labor
The myth of Rosie the Riveter is as well-known as her bandana-clad hair and stoic flexing. As a way to supplement male industrial labor resources depleted by World War II, Rosie represented the potential for women economically left behind since the Great Depression to gain financial power over their
Four Summer Books That Redefine the Beach Read
Who says a good beach read can’t also be a book that packs some punch? Here are four of this summer’s best.
The New Ethics for Writers of Color in A Post-Truth Era
My creative writing students want to talk about the business of literature. They want to talk cover letters, agents, MFA programs, fellowships.
This is Normal: Reading Evil in the Everyday
On Twitter, people keep saying this “isn’t normal.” In this story, the villain is an exception to the rule of normalcy. Maybe, I thought, that story is easier to tell than the real one.
Round Up: Roxane Gay, PEN Memberships, and NEA
From Roxane Gay pulling her book from Simon & Schuster to a list of NEA funded projects, here's the latest literary news.
Reconstruction: How the Lyric Essay Rendered One Body After Trauma
1. I didn’t start writing lyric essays until I found out I had cancer. The melanoma buried in my right cheek was at first missed, and then misdiagnosed in its severity. Clark’s stage IV, they told me. Likely in my lymph nodes, but they wouldn’t know until my third
Round-Up: AN UNTAMED STATE Film Adaptation, Robots, and AWP16
From a film adaptation of Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State to robots writing fiction, here’s a look at this week’s literary news: Author, essayist, and editor Roxane Gay can now add another title to her list of credentials: screenwriter. It was announced last week that Gay’s novel An Untamed
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