Roxane Gay offers bold advice to aspiring writers _ The Suffolk Journal
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Suffolk Journal
Roxane Gay offers bold advice to aspiring writers
By Jennifer Usovicz
The Little Building at Emerson College was packed to capacity March 19, with attendees spilling out onto the
aisles, waiting for a question and answer session and reading with Roxane Gay, author of New York Times
best seller “Bad Feminist.”
Gay sat at the front of the venue and opened with a witty anecdote about a new leather couch she recently
purchased. She had broken her ankle and was wheelchair bound at the time of the purchase and said an
unkind comment from a sales person warranted the purchase of a couch as retribution. The salesperson had
asked her if she enjoyed window shopping, so Gay, not one to be misjudged, told the audience her rebuttal to
the salesperson was, “I’m buying a damn couch.”
Gay finished her Ph.D in rhetoric and technical communication in 2010 from Michigan Technological
University and is currently teaching at Purdue University in Lafayette, Ohio.
Gay is an AfricanAmerican feminist writer and the child of immigrant parents. In her first essay, “Bad
Feminist,” she discusses the adversity she faced and the ways in which peers tried to break her.
Courtesy of Roxane Gay’s Facebook
She once overheard a former colleague in her graduate seminar remark, “She’s the affirmative action
student,” belittling Gay’s success and undermining her right to be there, she said.
At the seminar she was asked, “How do you write about sexual violence?” Gay responded that she deals with