Gay, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Ill. Gay is also an active, must-follow presence on Twitter: Her 74,000-plus tweets to date are dotted with occasional commentary on her obsessions, which include 'Law and Order: Special Victims Unit' and Channing Tatum. 'As a black girl, as a Haitian girl, I was not supposed to see myself in the Sweet Valley High books, but I did.'īoth books take up, in an unflinching way, the reality of sexual violence against women. Beyond several pieces that grapple with what it means to be a feminist, Gay writes with probing intelligence about pop-culture topics from the morality of Tyler Perry to how much the Sweet Valley High books mattered to her.

In August, Harper Perennial will publish 'Bad Feminist: Essays,' a collection of Gay's writing first published at outlets that range from Virginia Quarterly Review and The Rumpus to Buzzfeed. Comparing it to dark Brothers Grimm tales, Bass wrote that the novel's 'complex and fragile moral (is) arrived at through great pain and high cost.' Gay's recently released debut novel, 'An Untamed State' (Black Cat / Grove Press), the story of a young mother kidnapped for ransom by a Haitian gang, earned a glowing review from Holly Bass in The New York Times Book Review. Roxane Gay's breakout year should give readers hope that serious writers still have a place in the hot mess of today's publishing industry.

An untamed state review