Career Īfter completing her Ph.D., Gay began her academic teaching career in 2010 at Eastern Illinois University, where she was assistant professor of English. Ann Brady served as her dissertation advisor. Her dissertation is titled Subverting the Subject Position: Toward a New Discourse About Students as Writers and Engineering Students as Technical Communicators. She was inducted into the Omicron Delta Kappa Circle. in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University in 2010. She completed her undergraduate degree at Vermont College of Norwich University, and also earned a master's degree with an emphasis in creative writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Īfter matriculating 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. Her parents were relatively wealthy, supporting her through college and paying her rent until she was 30. Gay began writing essays as a teenager, with much of her early work being influenced by her experience with childhood sexual violence. She attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Gay was raised Catholic and spent her summers visiting family in Haiti. Her mother was a homemaker and her father is owner of GDG Béton et Construction, a Haitian concrete company. Gay was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to Michael and Nicole Gay, both of Haitian descent. Gay is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, essays editor for The Rumpus, co-editor of PANK, a nonprofit literary arts collective, and the editor for Gay Mag, which was founded in partnership with Medium. In 2018, she left Purdue to become a visiting professor at Yale University. Gay was an assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University for four years before joining Purdue University as an associate professor of English. 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). Roxane Gay (born October 15, 1974) is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator.

An untamed state by roxane gay