Dear Young Ladies Who Love Chris Brown So Much They Would Let Him Beat Them
Do you know what you’re saying? Do you really?
Roxane Gay
55 posts
Roxane Gay served as Essays Editor in the early days of The Rumpus, where she contributed many essays and interviews for the magazine. Some of her original pieces, first published here, found a home in her widely acclaimed New York Times bestseller essay collection Bad Feminist.
What We Need to Know
Since writing “The Careless Language of Sexual Violence,” I have started paying more attention to how the media reports on sexual abuse and rape cases, the ways the media frames…
Seriously Though, When Is White History Month?
It’s just that damn, every month feels like black history month. Black people get everything. Why is it wrong to feel white pride? Black people also get their own TV…
The Rumpus Interview with Alex Gilvarry
Part manifesto, part immigrant love story, part satire, part tragedy, Gilvarry’s debut novel is as moving as it is full of barely controlled anger, a tension that makes this well-written novel eminently readable.
The Rumpus Interview with Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s Mule & Pear is one of the most affecting books of poetry I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading
Resolved: A Year of Great(er) Expectations
The most frustrating part of not being able to keep quiet about the willful ways in which people are perfectly happy to enable the status quo is that when you…
Toward a More Complete Measure of Excellence
The measure of excellence is a pursuit with which writers and critics are often intensely concerned. At the end of each year any number of magazines and organizations issue a…
Once More, a Vocabulary Primer
The horrifying crisis unfolding at Penn State reminds us, yet again, of the carelessness of language used when we write about sexual violence.
Once, We Were (Not) Troy Davis And Then We Were Something Else
Life is the one disaster that is also a miracle. Or perhaps life is the one miracle that is also a disaster.
Roxane Gay: The Last Book I Loved, This Is Not Your City
When I was a kid, I loved participating in my school’s science fair each year even though I did not necessarily have any aptitude for the scientific. My experiments were…
The Solace of Preparing Fried Foods and Other Quaint Remembrances from 1960s Mississippi: Thoughts on The Help
Writing across race (or gender, sexuality, and disability) is complicated. Sometimes, it is downright messy.
Tragedy. Call. Compassion. Response.
Every day, terrible things happen in the world. Every damn day too many people die or suffer for reasons that defy comprehension.