Roxane Gay is a risk-taker. The author and cultural critic is unafraid to label herself a “bad feminist” — the title of her 2014 essay collection — or admit on national TV that, despite being a progressive, she owns a gun. She famously wrote about her complex relationship with food and her own body in her searing 2017 memoir, “Hunger,” a no-holds-barred exploration of how she became “super morbidly obese” and the accompanying shame she felt; at her heaviest, she weighed 577 pounds. Both books were critically acclaimed bestsellers, and established Gay as a literary lodestar.
But that’s not why the National Book Foundation is bestowing its 2025 Literarian Award on her later this year. Gay will receive the lifetime achievement honor Nov. 19 at the organization’s National Book Awards ceremony in recognition of service to the literary community through efforts including the Audacity newsletter, the Rumpus literary magazine (co-owned by Gay and her wife, Debbie Millman, since May) and advocacy for underrepresented and emerging writers alongside her own writing for the New York Times.
The annual honor, which comes with a $10,000 prize, puts Gay in the company of luminaries such as Maya Angelou, Terry Gross and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as to lesser-known booksellers and independent publishers. Gay “has intentionally and artfully carved out spaces to create opportunities for writers, readers and emerging publishing professionals of all backgrounds,” says David Steinberger, chair of the National Book Foundation’s board. “We will continue to reap the benefit of her achievements for generations,” he predicts.
In a Zoom interview from her home in Southern California — where Gay lives most of the year — the outspoken critic of censorship admits that when Ruth Dickey, executive director of the National Book Foundation, contacted her about the honor she first thought: “Oh, OK, she wants me to be on another committee.” When Dickey revealed the true purpose of her call, Gay had to remind herself to savor the moment: “I tend to downplay things,” she laughs, admitting that she now realizes “how wonderful it is — these moments don’t come often.”
Among her other activities, Gay in 2021 launched an eponymous book imprint with publisher Grove Atlantic and a year later began a tenure as the Gloria Steinem-endowed chair in media, culture and feminist studies at Rutgers. “I don’t think of myself primarily as an activist,” says Gay, who is “always trying to arc towards a greater good in everything I do.” True activists, she maintains, “are putting their lives on the line every day. Writing an essay about issues I care about just doesn’t rise to that level.”
The author was born in Omaha to Haitian immigrant parents, though Gay stresses that her path “wasn’t particularly difficult in that I grew up middle class and then upper middle class.” Her father was a civil engineer and her mother a homemaker; it was a loving and supportive family. Then, at 12, her childhood ended. “I was gang raped by a boy I thought I loved and a group of his friends,” she recalls in “Hunger.” “There’s a before and an after,” she writes of the experience. “In the after, I was broken, shattered, and silent. … I became nothing.” She turned to compulsive eating “so my body could become so big it would never be broken again.” At 13 she went away to boarding school, attending the elite Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where she “ate and ate and ate,” then Yale. But in her junior year — the start of her self-described lost years — Gay met a man in his 40s online. “For the first time in my life, I felt wanted,” she writes in her 2017 memoir. Telling no one, she abruptly dropped out of Yale and moved with him to Arizona. For several months, until her parents found her with the help of a private detective, she worked a phone sex job and hooked up with a string of strangers. With her family’s care and assistance, she made her way back to school, finishing her undergraduate degree at Vermont College, then enrolling in an MA program in creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. At night, she wrote stories, “mostly about women and their hurt because it was the only way I could think of to bleed out all the hurt I was feeling.” Page by page, she became a writer.
Roxane Gay is collaborating with her longtime crush, Channing Tatum, on a “sexy” romance novel.
(David Butow / For the Times)
“You have to hustle to make it as a writer,” Gay observes when asked to reflect on the obstacles she and others in their profession face. “It’s challenging to live a creative life in a world that doesn’t value creativity and art. I had to make a lot of opportunities for myself in the way anyone does.”
It enrages her that “some people have more barriers than others, whether it means that you’re working class or poor, or a person of color, or queer, or part of the gender spectrum.” Among her missions is to take down “the unnecessary gatekeeping that continues to make it so hard for people to make a living in the arts.”
Befitting her expansive approach, the latest anthology she curated, “The Portable Feminist Reader,” includes a wide variety of writing ranging from ancient texts to work by established feminists like bell hooks and Helene Cixous, alongside contemporaries such as Jessica Valenti, Sara Ahmed and Audre Lorde. Gay is also collaborating with her longtime crush, Channing Tatum, on a romance novel that she described as “very, very sexy,” during a witty appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” to promote “The Portable Feminist Reader” in late March.
“It’s very fun,” she says now of the sex-filled novel tentatively set to be published in late 2026. “Just sort of one of those pinch me-moments, like, ‘Is this really happening?’”
But how does a romance novel co-authored with a movie star sync with the serious tenor of her other work? “So much of what I write about is incredibly depressing and incredibly difficult, whether sexual violence or voting disparities or racial injustice and police brutality,” Gay says. “So I always try to balance the darkness with hopefully some light and joy.”
Gay plans to attend the National Book Awards ceremony in November, where she will be introduced by her friend and fellow writer, Jacqueline Woodson, who won a National Book Award in 2014 for the memoir “Brown Girl Dreaming” and has been a finalist three times since. Yes, Gay is an esteemed writer, thought leader and philanthropist, Woodson says, “but she is also out and funny and beyond brilliant. In all these ways, she’s showing young people that there are so many roads to becoming and living one’s true self.”
I had to know one last thing: What will Gay wear to the ceremony, to be held at the ultra-fancy Cipriani Wall Street (and livestreamed for readers everywhere). She scoffs at the question but then admits she will likely wear an outfit by Emily Meyer, a purveyor of luxe bespoke suits. “And I’ll be wearing a great pair of shoes no matter what,” she adds.