Dr. Roxane Gay

Dr. Roxane Gay is the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist, published by Harper Perennial in 2014; the memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, published by Harper in 2017; the short-story collection Difficult Women, published by Grove Press in 2017; and the novel An Untamed State, published by Grove Press in 2014. She has also written a Marvel comic-book run on World of Wakanda. She is a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times and the founder of Roxane Gay Books, an imprint at Grove Atlantic.

Her doctoral training was at Michigan Technological University where she earned a PhD in rhetoric and technical communication. She held academic positions at Eastern Illinois University and Purdue before transitioning to full-time writing and editorial work. Her newsletter The Audacity has been part of her platform work since 2021 and includes both her own writing and a regular emerging-writer feature.

Her mentor focus is memoir craft, the long discipline of essay writing, and the editorial work of bringing other writers' books into the world. The specific craft work of memoir — what is shared, what is withheld, the structural decisions about chronology and arc, the line-level prose work that distinguishes memoir from autobiography. The essay-craft work across different publication contexts — the literary essay, the political essay, the cultural-criticism essay, the personal essay. The editor side of trade publishing.

Her secondary mentor focus is the long arc of a writer's career across multiple forms. The decision about which projects to take. The agent-relationship and publisher-relationship work. The financial structure of a writer's income across advances, royalties, speaking fees, teaching income, and adjacent work. The platform decisions. The protection of time for the actual writing across all of the adjacent work.

Mentees who book with Roxane come from three primary populations. First: writers working on memoir or essay-collection projects with established agent relationships, looking for senior peer perspective on craft and on the publishing decisions. Second: established writers considering the editorial-work transition (their own imprint, anthology editing, guest-editing magazine issues). Third: writers in the first three to seven years of professional writing trying to build a sustainable practice.

Her style is candid and exacting. She is generous on craft questions and economical on questions she considers wishful thinking rather than working writing. Mentees who arrive with serious draft work get serious craft feedback. Mentees who arrive looking for affirmation will not get it.

Outside the direct writing and editorial work she is a frequent speaker on the lecture circuit, a regular guest on cultural-commentary platforms, and the co-host with Tressie McMillan Cottom of the podcast Hear to Slay. The Roxane Gay Books imprint has published a slate of debut and mid-career writers since launch, with editorial selection focused on writers whose work has been historically underserved by trade publishing.

She is a member of the Creative Arts and Media Circle network here, where she is one of the senior members of the writing-craft subgroup. She contributes to the Mental Health and Therapy network on the topics of memoir-writing-as-mental-health-work and on the specific topic of body-and-disability writing. She is also active in the Strong Black Woman Trope Deconstruction network on the topics of refusal, rest, and the dismantling work as writing practice.

Sessions are 45 minutes. The pre-session brief is a writing sample (memoir or essay manuscript pages, no more than five thousand words), a CV or summary of publishing work to date, and a one-page document on the specific question. She reads the writing sample before the session. The session structure is craft-first; she works the specific writing and the specific publishing decision. Mentees leave with detailed written notes on the writing sample and a specific action list. Follow-up sessions are common for writers in active manuscript revision.

Her writing across forms — essay, memoir, short fiction, novel, comic book, newsletter — represents a deliberate range of practice. The decision to work across forms is theoretically and practically grounded. The essay reaches one audience; the memoir reaches another; the fiction reaches a third. The discipline of moving between forms keeps the writer's craft fresh across decades.

The Roxane Gay Books imprint at Grove Atlantic represents her transition into the editor-side of trade publishing. The imprint has acquired and published debut and mid-career writers whose work has been historically underserved by trade publishing. The acquisition-decision-making, the editor-author relationship work, the production-and-marketing infrastructure that publishes the books — all of this is part of the practice that mentees considering the editor-side transition can learn from.

Her newsletter The Audacity reaches a substantial subscriber base and includes both her own writing and a regular emerging-writer feature that has placed work by writers she has championed. The newsletter is part of the broader platform infrastructure she has built across the past decade.

On the body-and-disability writing in Hunger she is open about the cost of the book and what it took to write. The memoir was honest about experiences that the broader literary culture has not always known how to receive. Mentees working on memoir projects that touch on body, trauma, and disability find her perspective particularly useful.

Her podcast Hear to Slay with Tressie McMillan Cottom has been part of the platform infrastructure since 2019 and represents another form of public-intellectual practice alongside the writing.

Her engagement in the platform's Creative Arts and Media Circle, the Mental Health and Therapy network, and the Strong Black Woman Trope Deconstruction network represents the depth of her practice across writing, memoir, and the body-and-identity work that has been part of her broader literary project. Her contributions to discussion threads on memoir craft, essay discipline, and the editorial work of bringing other writers' books into the world are foundational to the writing-craft subgroup specifically.

The creative-industries landscape continues to evolve in ways that affect Black women creators and creative-industries professionals specifically. The financing landscape for films, books, and adjacent creative-industries projects has shifted across the past decade. The platform landscape has shifted. The agent-and-publisher relationships have shifted. The mentor practice connects specifically to the senior-level craft questions and to the structural conditions that determine whether individual creative-industries careers progress at parity.

The mentor practice on this platform is part of a broader commitment to structured, professional mentorship for African and African-diaspora women across the long arc of their careers. The platform's session-management infrastructure — booking, calendaring, payment (where applicable), pre-session briefs, in-session notes, and post-session follow-up — is designed to support sustained mentor-mentee relationships across multiple sessions for mentees who benefit from that continuity. Mentees are welcome to book initial single sessions, structured multi-session engagements, or ongoing relationships across longer career arcs. The structure follows the work.