Author Guide · Essays & Memoir
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Roxane Gay writes at full contradiction and refuses to resolve it — the title Bad Feminist is the whole method in two words. Across essays, fiction, and memoir, she holds difficult things next to each other without smoothing them into a single argument: loving problematic pop culture and demanding better from it, writing violence against women without turning it into spectacle, describing her own body with more precision and less apology than almost anyone else has managed. She’s one of the sharpest working critics of how culture actually functions, and one of its most honest chroniclers of what it costs to live inside a body the culture judges.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Essays · Memoir · Fiction · 2011–2023 · Updated September 2026
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Quick answer
Roxane Gay has written six books of her own: the story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), the story collection Difficult Women (2017), the memoir Hunger (2017) and the essay collection Opinions (2023). Alongside those she wrote Marvel’s World of Wakanda (2016–17), three books with collaborators — The Banks (2019), The Sacrifice of Darkness (2020) and Do the Work (2024) — and edited four anthologies, including Not That Bad (2018). Start with Bad Feminist for her signature voice, or Hunger for her most personal book. Born 15 October 1974 in Omaha, Nebraska, she holds the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers and received the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award in 2025.
Quick facts about Roxane Gay
- Born
- 15 October 1974, Omaha, Nebraska — to Haitian parents
- Books of her own
- 6, from Ayiti (2011) to Opinions (2023)
- Also wrote
- Marvel’s World of Wakanda, two graphic novels and Do the Work (2024, with Megan Pillow)
- Also edited
- four anthologies, including Not That Bad (2018) and The Best American Short Stories 2018
- Studied at
- Yale (did not finish), Vermont College of Norwich University, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and Michigan Tech (PhD, 2010)
- Taught at
- Eastern Illinois (2010–14), Purdue (2014–18), Yale (visiting, 2019)
- Now
- Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies, Rutgers, since 2022
- Biggest award
- National Book Foundation Literarian Award, 2025 — for service to the American literary community
- Also runs
- Roxane Gay Books, her imprint at Grove Atlantic, and the newsletter The Audacity
- Best-known book
- Bad Feminist (2014), a New York Times bestseller
All 6 books by Roxane Gay, in order
Ayiti
Gay’s debut, a slim, genre-blurring collection of fiction, essays, and poetry about the Haitian diaspora experience — violence, migration, memory, and the impossibility of fully belonging to two places at once. Originally released by a small press, it was later reissued by Grove Press once Gay’s later books made her a known name.
Rougher and more formally experimental than her later, more polished work, but it establishes the concerns — displacement, the body, cultural inheritance — that run through everything she’d write afterward.
— LisanneAn Untamed State
Mireille, a Haitian-American woman visiting her wealthy family in Port-au-Prince, is kidnapped and held for ransom for thirteen days, during which she survives sustained brutality while her father refuses, on principle, to pay. The novel then follows what recovery does and doesn’t look like once she’s physically safe again. It was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Gay writes violence without flinching and without turning it into spectacle for the reader — a genuinely difficult balance, held with real control. Not an easy read, but a necessary one for understanding what she’s capable of in fiction.
— LisanneBad Feminist: Essays
Gay’s breakthrough essay collection, moving between pop culture criticism, memoir, and political argument, united by her central premise: that she loves things — certain rap lyrics, certain rom-coms, the color pink — that don’t fit a tidy feminist orthodoxy, and that this contradiction doesn’t disqualify her from the label. A New York Times bestseller.
The book that made her voice recognizable: sharp, funny, self-implicating, and allergic to purity tests. If you want to understand why people quote her constantly, this is where the quotes come from.
— LisanneDifficult Women
A collection of short stories about women who are, in one way or another, hard to categorize or easy to dismiss — women shaped by grief, wealth, violence, and desire, none of them written to be likable on the reader’s terms. It became a national bestseller.
A useful companion to Bad Feminist: where the essays argue for the value of contradiction directly, these stories simply enact it, through characters who refuse to resolve into something more comfortable.
— LisanneHunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
Gay’s most personal book, connecting her body directly to trauma: a childhood sexual assault she says led her to intentionally gain weight as a form of self-protection, and the decades of living in a body that the culture treats as a problem to be solved. She has said this was the book she “wanted to write the least.” A New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle finalist.
Her most direct writing, with none of the essay collections’ cultural-criticism distance to hide behind. If you only read one Roxane Gay book for the body and vulnerability angle, this is it.
— LisanneOpinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business
A collection of Gay’s opinion writing for The New York Times over roughly a decade, covering state violence, mass shootings, women’s rights after the fall of Roe v. Wade, disinformation, and the limits of empathy, alongside sharper, smaller cultural observations.
Her most explicitly journalistic book, and a good measure of how consistent her core arguments have stayed even as the news cycle around her has changed completely.
— LisanneThe Other Books: Comics, Collaborations and the Ones She Edited
The six books above are the ones I have read in full. Gay has published a good deal more than that, and it is the main reason the count of her work varies so much from site to site. Here is the rest of it.
- World of Wakanda (2016–17) — Marvel — Gay wrote Marvel’s World of Wakanda, a Black Panther spin-off centred on the Dora Milaje, with Ta-Nehisi Coates and the poet Yona Harvey. It made her the first Black woman to write for Marvel, and it won the 2018 Eisner Award for Best Limited Series.
- The Banks (2019) — graphic novel — A heist story about three generations of women in one Chicago family, drawn by Ming Doyle. Gay’s first original graphic novel, and the closest thing she has written to straight genre fiction.
- The Sacrifice of Darkness (2020) — graphic novel — Adapted with Tracy Lynne Oliver from Gay’s own short story “We Are the Sacrifice of Darkness”: a man flies into the sun and the world is left without daylight. Fable rather than realism, and the most unlike anything else she has done.
- Graceful Burdens (2020) — a story on its own — A single short story published as its own release rather than inside a collection, about a world in which women need a licence to have children. Short enough to read in a sitting.
- Do the Work (2024) — with Megan Pillow — Co-authored, and her most recent book. It sits outside the essay-collection shape of her other non-fiction.
- Four anthologies she edited, not wrote — Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018), The Best American Short Stories 2018, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (2020) and The Portable Feminist Reader (2025). Her name is on the cover of all four, which is why they turn up in lists of books she wrote. She selected and introduced them.
- And the things that are not books — Roxane Gay Books, her own imprint at Grove Atlantic since 2021; the newsletter The Audacity; the podcast The Roxane Gay Agenda; and a contributing opinion writer’s slot at The New York Times. Between 2017 and 2023 there is a six-year gap in the list of books above, and this is what filled it.
Roxane Gay’s Writing: Holding Two Things at Once
The method is in the title of her best-known book. Bad Feminist does not argue that the contradiction can be resolved — it argues that insisting on resolution is the mistake. Gay will state a position, state the thing about herself that undercuts it, and leave both standing. Most critics use the personal detail to strengthen the argument; she uses it to complicate her own.
Second habit: she names the cost. Writing about a body, about violence, about being read as a public figure, she is specific about what it takes rather than what it means. Hunger is the clearest case — a memoir that keeps refusing the recovery arc the form usually supplies — but the same refusal is in the fiction, where An Untamed State spends its second half on what does not get better.
The prose itself is plain on purpose. Short declaratives, very little metaphor, an aversion to the elevated register. That plainness is what makes her quotable: the sentences survive being lifted out of the paragraph, which is why they circulate.
The range is wider than the essayist reputation suggests. In the same decade she wrote a Marvel series, two graphic novels, a novel, two story collections and a memoir. What holds across all of it is a refusal to make a difficult person more likeable in order to make a point land.
Roxane Gay Books in Order
In publication order, her own books run: Ayiti (2011), An Untamed State (2014), Bad Feminist (2014), Difficult Women (2017), Hunger (2017) and Opinions (2023). Two of those years carry two books: 2014 gave both her first novel and the essay collection that made her name, and 2017 gave the stories and the memoir within six months of each other.
Reading order barely matters here, because nothing continues from one book to the next. What changes is the distance she keeps. Bad Feminist argues from a critic’s chair, Difficult Women puts the same arguments inside characters, and Hunger removes the chair altogether. Read in that order the books get progressively harder to hide behind, which is roughly how she wrote them.
The one genuine gap is between 2017 and 2023. It is not a silence: those are the years of the Marvel run, the graphic novels, the anthologies, the newsletter and the imprint. They are listed below, under the numbered books.
Where to Start with Roxane Gay
If you have never read her
→ Start with Bad Feminist. It is the book that made her voice recognisable, and it is the one the quotes come from.
If you want the most personal book
→ Hunger. Her most direct writing, with none of the cultural-criticism distance to hide behind.
If you would rather read fiction
→ An Untamed State for the novel, Difficult Women for the stories. The novel is harder going; the stories let you put the book down between them.
If you want to see how the arguments have held up
→ Opinions collects a decade of her New York Times writing, which makes it the easiest place to watch the same ideas meet ten years of very different news.
Frequently asked questions about Roxane Gay's books
How many books has Roxane Gay written?
Roxane Gay has written six books of her own: Ayiti (2011), An Untamed State (2014), Bad Feminist (2014), Difficult Women (2017), Hunger (2017), and Opinions (2023). She has also written Marvel’s World of Wakanda (2016–17), the graphic novels The Banks (2019) and The Sacrifice of Darkness (2020, with Tracy Lynne Oliver), the standalone story Graceful Burdens (2020), and Do the Work (2024, with Megan Pillow). She has edited four anthologies, including Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018) and The Best American Short Stories 2018.
Is it Roxane Gay or Roxanne Gay?
It’s Roxane Gay, with one n. Roxanne, Roxanna, Roxann and Roxane Gaye are all common misspellings, because the name Roxanne with two n’s is far more familiar in English. The author of Bad Feminist spells it R-O-X-A-N-E.
Who is Roxane Gay?
Roxane Gay is an American writer, editor and professor, born on 15 October 1974 in Omaha, Nebraska, to Haitian parents. She is best known for the essay collection Bad Feminist (2014) and the memoir Hunger (2017). She holds the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and runs her own imprint, Roxane Gay Books, at Grove Atlantic. In 2025 she received the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.
Where did Roxane Gay go to school — did she go to Harvard?
No. She began her undergraduate studies at Yale but did not finish there. She took her BA at Vermont College of Norwich University, a master’s in creative writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and a PhD in rhetoric and technical communication at Michigan Technological University in 2010. She later returned to Yale as a visiting professor in the spring of 2019, which may be where the confusion comes from.
What is Roxane Gay’s best book?
Bad Feminist (2014) is her best-known and most widely read book, a New York Times bestseller that established her signature voice. It’s the most commonly recommended starting point for new readers.
What is Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger about?
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017) is Roxane Gay’s memoir about her relationship with food, weight, and body image, connecting it directly to a childhood sexual assault that she says led her to intentionally gain weight as a way of trying to make herself feel safer.
What order should I read Roxane Gay’s books in?
Publication order works, but nothing continues from one book to the next, so you can start anywhere. Most readers begin with Bad Feminist (2014), then Hunger (2017) if they want the personal writing or Difficult Women (2017) if they want fiction. An Untamed State (2014) is the hardest going and is better read once you already trust her. Opinions (2023) collects a decade of her New York Times columns and reads well at any point.
Is Roxane Gay a professor?
Yes. Roxane Gay holds the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University’s Institute for Women’s Leadership, and has previously taught at Purdue University and Eastern Illinois University.
Has Roxane Gay won any awards?
Yes. In 2025 the National Book Foundation gave her the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, its award for a career rather than a single book. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018, an Eisner Award the same year for Marvel’s World of Wakanda, and the PEN Center USA Freedom to Write Award in 2015. Hunger was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and An Untamed State was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Did Roxane Gay write for Marvel?
Yes. She wrote World of Wakanda (2016–17), a Black Panther spin-off following the Dora Milaje, alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates and the poet Yona Harvey. It made her the first Black woman to write a series for Marvel, and it won the 2018 Eisner Award for Best Limited Series. She has since written two original graphic novels, The Banks (2019) and The Sacrifice of Darkness (2020).
What should I read after Bad Feminist?
Within her own work: Hunger if you want her to stop arguing and start telling, Difficult Women if you want the same ideas as fiction, and Opinions if you want more of the criticism. For other writers who hold contradiction without resolving it, my best non-fiction reading list has the closest matches.
Sources
- Roxane Gay — Wikipedia
- Books — roxanegay.com
- Roxane Gay — Britannica
- Roxane Gay Appointed Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair — Rutgers University
- Roxane Gay Receives Lifetime Achievement Award From the National Book Foundation — JBHE
- Best-selling author selected for 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship — Purdue University
Bibliography last verified 7 September 2026.
“I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human.”
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014).
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