ROXANE GAY, born on this date,  is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti, the novel An Untamed State, the short story collection Difficult Women, and the memoir Hunger (2017).

Gay is the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She was an assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University for four years before joining Purdue University as an associate professor of English, where she was tenured. In 2018, she left Purdue to become a visiting professor at Yale University. She joined Rutgers in 2022.

Gay is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, essays editor for The Rumpus, and the editor for Gay Mag, which was founded in partnership with Medium.

In 2023, Gay was one of more than 370 New York Times contributors to sign an open letter expressing “serious concerns about editorial bias” in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender people. The letter characterized the reporting as using “an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language”, and raised concerns regarding the newspaper’s employment practices regarding trans contributors. The following year, Gay published an essay in the New York Times decrying—despite the worthy tradition of Émile Zola’s J’Accuse…! and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—the open letter as a form that “Should End,” as it allows writers to “hold fast to [their] deeply held beliefs without having to question them or grapple with doubt” and to “mitigate… helplessness with performance rather than practice.” 

Gay’s curriculum vitae is too extensive to include much of it here.  Among other awards and recognitions, she is a Guggenheim Fellow, and has received two PEN awards. She has received the Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Literature from Lambda Literary.

In January 2018, Gay revealed that she had undergone sleeve gastrectomy, a bariatric surgery that removes 75–85% of the stomach. She is 6 feet 3 inches tall. Gay is bisexual. In October 2019, she became engaged to artist and writer Debbie Millman. In August 2020, Gay revealed that they had eloped.