Roxane Gay on Using Her Voice for Good and in Service of Others

Roxane Gay describes her wild trajectory as a multihyphenate writer-editor-publisher-professor-social commentator as “fairly bewildering.” And she’s not wrong: Over the past decade—and with long odds stacked up against her as a queer Black woman of size—Gay has had a meteoric rise in the media and publishing stratosphere, achieving rare heights. She has written a best-selling memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017); a book of essays, Bad Feminist (2014); and two collections of short stories, Ayiti (2001) and Difficult Women (2017). She publishes a weekly newsletter called The Audacity and hosts The Roxane Gay Agenda podcast. Gay is also a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. This spring, she launched the Roxane Gay Books imprint with the publisher Grove Atlantic, and this fall, she begins her rarified position as the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her next book, the astutely titled How to Be Heard, comes out in the spring. 

Across all of her work, Gay addresses topics related to feminism, women’s rights, rape culture, sexual violence, weight and body image, trauma, race, and friendship. Gay, it is safe to say, is one of the most essential writers of our time, someone hyperattuned to the moment we’re in and who fights like hell for the issues and causes she deeply believes in. Now in a well-earned position of power, she uses the influence she has to elevate the voices of other writers she feels are being or have been overlooked.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Gay talks with Spencer about her nomadic childhood across America as the daughter of Roman Catholic Haitian immigrant parents, her fluid and flexible approach to time, and her open-armed joy of cooking.

Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

• Roxane Gay
• [04:16] Bad Feminist
• [04:16] Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
• [13:01] Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies
• [13:12] Roxane Gay Books
• [13:16] The Audacity Newsletter
• [13:18] Roxane Gay Agenda Podcast
• [13:22] Roxane Gay MasterClass
• [45:31] Ayiti
• [45:31] An Untamed State
• [45:31] Difficult Women
• [48:20] T Magazine “Cooking Class” videos