Featured Events

#AWP25 Keynote Address by Roxane Gay

Thursday, March 27, 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. PT



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.