罗克珊·盖伊

罗克珊·盖伊（Roxane Gay，1974年10月15日—） 是一位美国作家、教授、编辑和社会评论家以及纽约时报的特约评论作家 。

盖伊是她曾是普渡大学的副教授。 2018年，她离开普渡大学，成为耶鲁大学的客座教授。 她于2022年成为罗格斯大学的讲座教授。

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.

Early life and education

Gay was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on October 15, 1974, to Michael and Nicole Gay, both of Haitian descent. Her mother was a homemaker and her father is owner of GDG Béton et Construction, a Haitian concrete company. She is a cousin of Harvard University professor Claudine Gay.

Gay was raised Catholic and spent her summers visiting family in Haiti. She attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Gay began writing essays as a teenager, with much of her early work being influenced by her experience with childhood sexual violence. Her parents were relatively wealthy, supporting her through college and paying her rent until she was 30.

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.

Career

After completing her Ph.D., Gay began her academic teaching career in 2010 at Eastern Illinois University, where she was assistant professor of English. While at EIU, she was a contributing editor for Bluestem magazine, and she also founded Tiny Hardcore Press. Gay worked at Eastern Illinois University until the end of the 2013–14 academic year. She was an associate professor of creative writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Purdue University from August 2014 until 2018. Gay announced her departure from Purdue in October 2018, voicing concerns about the fairness of her compensation and noting Purdue had failed to address the issue. For the spring of 2019 Gay was a visiting professor at Yale University. In 2022, she joined Rutgers University, becoming the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies.

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.