Gay left Eastern Illinois University after the 2013-2014 academic year and began teaching as an associate professor of Creative Writing at Purdue University in August 2014. During this time, she founded her publishing company, Tiny Hardcore Press. In Fall 2010, after obtaining her Ph.D., Gay started her academic teaching career as an assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. from Michigan Technological University in 2010 in Rhetoric and Technical Communication. She later returned to school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to finish her undergraduate degree and then obtained an MA with a concentration in Creative Writing from there. Īfter graduating high school, Gay attended Yale University but dropped out her junior year at 19 years old to pursue a relationship with a 44-year-old man in Arizona. Gay attended Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. She then began writing essays as a teenager. At age 12, she was sexually assaulted, which would greatly influence her later works. Gay was born October 15th, 1974 in Omaha, Nebraska to a Haitian American family.
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Roxane Gay Roxane Gay speaking at TED Women in Monterey, California, 2015. Her work is influenced by her personal experiences of being a woman, person of color, openly bisexual, and a Haitian American. Her writings and work deal with topics of intersectionality, race, gender, class, privilege, sexuality, weight, and self-image on both a personal and societal level. Her other major projects also include editing essays for the online literary magazine The Rumpus, co-editor of PANK, and founding publishing company Tiny Hardcore Press. In addition to her own individual writings, Gay is a contributing Op-Ed writer for The New York Times, covering intersectionality with a focus on the cross between culture and identity. She is best known for her works of writing, which include the short story collection Ayiti (2011), New York Times bestseller essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), An Untamed State (2014), short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and memoir Hunger (2017). Roxane Gay is an American author, professor, and women's rights activist, focusing primarily on the field of women and gender studies.