An Evening with Roxane Gay

Join us for an evening lecture followed by a Q&A session with Roxane Gay. Book signing to follow the lecture at 8:30PM, with books available for sale at the venue.

Doors open at 6:30PM. To guarantee your seat, you must be at the auditorium by 6:45PM. After this time, we will begin to take attendees on the waitlist or standby.

Event will take place at the Di Ciccio Family Auditorium in the Salomon Center (79 Waterman St.)

Roxane Gay is an author and cultural critic whose writing is unmatched and widely revered. Her work garners international acclaim for its reflective, no-holds-barred exploration of feminism and social criticism. With a deft eye on modern culture, she brilliantly critiques its ebb and flow with both wit and ferocity.

Words like “courage,” “humor,” and “smart” are frequently deployed when describing Roxane. Her collection of essays, Bad Feminist, is universally considered the quintessential exploration of modern feminism. NPR named it one of the best books of the year and Salon declared the book “trailblazing.” Her powerful debut novel, An Untamed State, was long listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. In 2017, Roxane will release her highly anticipated memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, as well as a collection of short stories titled Difficult Women.

Roxane is a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times, was the co-editor of PANK, and formerly was the non-fiction editor at The Rumpus. Her writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nation and many other publications. She recently became the first black woman to ever write for Marvel, writing a comic series in the Black Panther universe called World of Wakanda. Roxane fronts a small army of avid fans on social media and when she finds the time, she dominates the occasional Scrabble tournament.

Her newest work, Difficult Women, was released in January 2017. "The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. A pair of sisters, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children and must negotiate the elder sister’s marriage. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind. From a girls’ fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay gives voice to a chorus of unforgettable women in a scintillating collection reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July." (quoted from Grove Atlantic)

This event is organized by the Department of American Studies, with great thanks to our generous sponsors: the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy, the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the Office for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the Sarah Doyle Women's Center, the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, the Brown Center for Students of Color Latino Heritage Series and Black Heritage Series, the LGBTQ Center, the Department of Theater and Performance Studies, the Department of Literary Arts, the Department of Education, the Department of History, the Department of Modern Culture and Media, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Africana Studies, the Department of Anthropology, and the Graduate Student Council.