Roxane Gay

Writer, editor and professor Roxane Gay took the literary world by storm with a range of accessible feminist works before becoming the first black woman to pen a Marvel comic series. Born in Omaha, NE to Haitian parents, Gay started writing her own stories aged just four and went on to gain a place at Yale University studying English and Creative Writing, only to drop out after a year to spend twelve months in Arizona with a much older man she had befriended online. Gay eventually finished her undergraduate course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and furthered her education with a doctoral degree in rhetoric and technical communication from Michigan Technological University. She then moved to the other side of the desk when she was appointed assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, a period in which she also served as editor for literary magazine Bluestem and Girl Crush: Women's Erotic Fantasies, founded independent publisher Tiny Hardcore Press and published short story collection Ayiti. Gay's breakthrough as a writer arrived in 2014, the same year she took the job of Creative Writing Associate Professor at Purdue University. Partly inspired by her own traumatic experience of a childhood sexual assault, novel An Untamed State received glowing reviews for its unflinching tale of a young mother kidnapped and gang-raped while vacationing in Haiti. Meanwhile, essay collection, Bad Feminist, saw Gay address both weighty issues and her pop culture obsessions to equally acclaimed effect, with Time magazine declaring 'Let this be the year of Roxane Gay.' In 2016 Gay became the first black female lead writer at Marvel Comics when she and poet Yona Harvey were chosen to pen the Black Panther spin-off World of Wakanda, while a year later she tackled her own relationships with weight, body image and food in the memoir, Hunger.