Join us for an evening with Roxane Gay as she reads selections from her work.
Roxane Gay is a prominent journalist and author on feminism, race, gender, and their intersections. This semester she is a Presidential Visiting Fellow and is teaching an undergraduate seminar on writing trauma. Roxane has authored the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. Her writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.
Claudia Rankine, the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale and a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, will lead a Q&A with Roxane following the reading. Claudia is the author of five collections of poetry, including “Citizen: An American Lyric” and “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely”; two plays including “Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue”; numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including “The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.” For “Citizen,” Rankine won the Forward Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (“Citizen” was also nominated in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a double nominee), the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award. A finalist for the National Book Award, “Citizen” also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts.
Free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:45 pm.
Co-sponsored by Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; the English Department; the Afro-American Cultural Center; and the Women Faculty Forum.