Roxane Gay (’04) has been very busy.
“I am a bit of a workaholic,” Gay said. “I need to get some hobbies.”
While she does play competitive Scrabble, Gay is perhaps most well-known for her searing, unfiltered voice. The writer, professor, editor and commentator has authored five books including Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, and — most recently — Hunger, which chronicles Gay’s relationship with her body.
By Mekita Rivas (’12)
“I got the idea because I immediately knew that the thing I wanted to write about the least was fatness,” she said. “So that was, probably, the thing I needed to write about the most.”
“The response has been really positive,” she said. “I’ve been surprised by just how many people have been able to relate to the themes I cover in Hunger, even if their lives look very different from mine.”
Although it took “a long time” to get started on Hunger, Gay wrote the book in about five months.
“Just making myself so vulnerable and remaining committed to honesty were very challenging,” she said. “It is uncomfortable to put something so intimate and personal into the world. But I did what I always do, which is pretend no one is going to read my work so I can say whatever I want.”
That unapologetic attitude has become Gay’s signature. In her Twitter bio (@rgay), she puts it bluntly: “If you clap, I clap back.” She boasts more than 400,000 followers who live for her troll takedowns and her commentary on everything from pop culture and politics to the trials and tribulations of constantly having her name misspelled (there’s just one “N,” folks).
Before the bestsellers and the legions of followers, Gay was a UNL graduate student who frequented the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center. “It was awesome to finally have access to independent films,” she said.
Gay also honed her craft at the Prairie Schooner.
“I loved working on Prairie Schooner,” she said. “I learned so much about writing, reading, and editing from my time there. That magazine is a national treasure, and it deserves all the recognition in the world.”
One class, in particular, resonated with Gay, who studied English and creative writing.
“I took a great class on Victorian literature,” she said. “We read a lot of Oscar Wilde, who quickly became one of my favorite writers. To this day, that class remains one of the most useful courses I’ve ever taken.”
After UNL, Gay went on to Michigan Tech-nological University, where she earned a doctoral degree in rhetoric and technical communication. She currently splits her time between Los Angeles and Lafayette, Ind., where she’s an associate professor of English at Purdue University.
Gay is slated to return to UNL’s campus in October for an event. In the meantime, she will continue her workaholic tendencies: She has several books forthcoming, is developing various television and film projects, and will continue penning an advice column for the Times.
“For me success has been as small as getting a story accepted at an online magazine early in my career and as big as winning a prestigious award and selling a lot of books,” she said. “Success is about putting good work into the world and having that work seen and respected. Success is also about having grown enough to love the people in my life well and to be well loved in return.”