Roxane Gay
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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…
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Roxane Wins “Best Rant”
Electric Literature is embarking on a new ranking system that will most definitely change the way you reflect on the past month of online book reviews. It’s called the Critical Hit Awards, and only three reviews are picked per month.…
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Best Sex Writing 2012
The official Table of Contents won’t be released for a couple of weeks, but a little birdie whispered in our ears (okay, announced it on her Facebook page) that Roxane Gay’s piece “The Careless Language of Sexual Violence”, which we…
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Aimee Nezhukumatathil Interview
Over at HTML giant Roxane Gay interviews Aimee Nezhukumatathil, shedding light on the poet’s influences—from the natural world and family, to language, and more. The conversation turns to her third book, Lucky Fish, and the process of assembling a collection…
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Wendell Pierce on the Help
After we published Roxane Gay’s essay on the Help last week, it launched a major discussion not only about the shortcomings of the movie and the book, but on how pop culture negotiates and regenerates historical movements, tired slave narratives,…