Thursday, March 27, 8:00-10:00 p.m. PT
Petree Hall D, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
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 Gay. 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 longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. In 2017, Gay released her bestselling memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, which was called “Luminous. . . . intellectually rigorous and deeply moving” by The New York Times. She also released her collection of short stories, Difficult Women. The Los Angeles Times says of the collection, “There’s a distinct echo of Angela Carter or Helen Oyeyemi at play; dark fables and twisted morality tales sit alongside the contemporary and the realistic.”
In 2018, she released Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, a valuable and searing anthology that has been described as “essential reading” and a “call to arms” by its readers. In 2020, Gay released the short story Graceful Burdens, as an Amazon Single, as well as a graphic novel called The Sacrifice of Darkness. Gay was the first Black woman to lead a Marvel title, writing a comic series in the Black Panther universe called World of Wakanda.
Gay hosts the Webby Award–winning podcast The Roxane Gay Agenda, where she has interesting conversations with interesting people. She also penned the Work Friend advice column for The New York Times for four years, and in 2021 she began her own publishing imprint with Grove Atlantic, Roxane Gay Books. She has several books forthcoming, including How to Be Heard, on writing advice and how to use your voice, as well as The Year I Learned Everything, a young adult novel. She is also at work on television and film projects, including a film adaptation of Hunger and a television adaptation of her comic book The Banks.
Roxane fronts a small army of avid fans on social media, and when she finds the time, she dominates the occasional Scrabble tournament.
AWP welcomes attendees from indigenous communities to the Annual Conference & Bookfair. We invite these honored guests to the first rows of reserved seating at the #AWP25 Keynote Address. AWP is grateful to have Wallace Cleaves provide a short reading at the beginning of this event.
Wallace Cleaves is Associate Dean and Director of the University Writing Program at UC Riverside and has served as Director of the California Center for Native Nations. His work, teaching, and research center around the fields of composition, medieval literature, and Indigenous methodologies. He is a member of the Gabrieleno/Tongva Native American tribe, the Indigenous peoples of the Los Angeles area, and has served in a variety of positions on the Tribal Council, on the board of the Kuruvungna Springs Foundation, and he is currently the president of the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy.
Recent publications include: the 13th edition of St. Martin’s Guide to Writing, “Mission Project: Activism on a Smaller Scale” in World Literature Today, a Bloomberg CityLab article entitled “Native Land Acknowledgments Are Not the Same As Land” with fellow Tongva Tribal member Charlie Sepulveda, a pushcart nominated coauthored work of Indigenous speculative fiction titled “A Parable of Things that Crawl and Fly” in Pulp Literature, and the essay “From Monmouth to Madoc to Maori: The Myth of Medieval Colonization and an Indigenous Alternative” in the Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts issue of English Language Notes.
Recent publications include: the 13th edition of St. Martin’s Guide to Writing, “Mission Project: Activism on a Smaller Scale” in World Literature Today, a Bloomberg CityLab article entitled “Native Land Acknowledgments Are Not the Same As Land” with fellow Tongva Tribal member Charlie Sepulveda, a pushcart nominated coauthored work of Indigenous speculative fiction titled “A Parable of Things that Crawl and Fly” in Pulp Literature, and the essay “From Monmouth to Madoc to Maori: The Myth of Medieval Colonization and an Indigenous Alternative” in the Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts issue of English Language Notes.