Essays
-
Micropress Managing
Rumpus contributor Roxane Gay details the ins and outs of starting a micropress based on the lessons she’s learned starting Tiny Hardcore Press. “You have to be prepared to hustle. You have to be willing to promote your book, and…
-
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 voice concerns about the lack of diversity in any given…
-
On Revelations
“When you write personally and intimately, difficult questions arise. Whose stories do we, as writers, have the right to tell? To what extent do we have the right to write about the people in our lives? What are the limits…
-
More Year-End Love
Rumpus contributor Roxane Gay’s book Ayiti was listed by the The National Book Critics Circle blog as one of their Small Press Highlights of 2011. Of Ayiti they write “The title is the Haitian Creole name for Haiti and in…
-
Roxane Gay on The Situation in American Writing
“The Situation in American writing,” Full Stop’s questionnaire for prominent authors—with questions ranging from literary criticism to war—elicits some excellent responses from Roxane Gay. “My writing is lots of things but more often than not, the stories and essays I…
-
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 list or series of lists to quantify the year’s best…
-
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 never that inspiring but I certainly thought they were—volcanoes erupting…
-
Defending Women Writers
Roxane Gay’s on HTML Giant talking about the covers of chick-lit novels and the stigma attached to their formulaic visual coding, though the feminization of book covers is taking over more than just the chick-lit genre. It’s unfortunate that women…
-
To Teach Or Not to Teach?
The ever-contentious subject of teaching creative writing is up for discussion. You can teach the elements, but there are always the “intangibles that cannot be taught.” Roxane Gay is inciting a discussion on HTMLGiant, laying some foundation for all of…