WRITER

Roxane Gay

1974 - Today

Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay (born October 15, 1974) is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017). Gay was an assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University for four years before joining Purdue University as an associate professor of English. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Roxane Gay has received more than 2,268,466 page views. Her biography is available in 22 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 18 in 2019). Roxane Gay is the 7,115th most popular writer (down from 6,388th in 2019), the 16,746th most popular biography from United States (down from 15,854th in 2019) and the 1,149th most popular American Writer.

Memorability Metrics

2.3M
Page Views (PV)
32.69
Historical Popularity Index (HPI)
22
Languages Editions (L)
1.55
Effective Languages (L*)
4.18
Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Notable Works

Hunger

Biography, African American women, Overweight women

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.” In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself. With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

2016

Opinions

2023

Ayiti

Fiction, short stories (single author)

1918

Untamed State

Fiction, suspense, Fiction, thrillers, general, Haiti, fiction

2014

Bad Feminist

Race awareness in motion pictures, Conduct of life, African Americans in mass media

2014

Difficult Women

Fiction, women, Women -- Fiction, Short stories, American

306 pages ; 21 cm

2017

Page views of Roxane Gays by language

Over the past year Roxane Gay has had the most page views in the English wikipedia edition with 342,475 views, followed by French (13,606), and German (8,395). In terms of yearly growth of page views the top 3 wikpedia editions are Ukrainian (1,812.50%), Italian (1,584.34%), and Portuguese (1,533.33%)