Renowned Social Commentator and Author Roxane Gay Guest Speaker for University Forum March 21

Fri, 03/10/2023 - 10:59am

Roxane Gay, a widely followed social commentator and New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger, will be the guest speaker for The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) University Forum speaker series Tuesday, March 21 at 6:30 p.m. in Bennett Auditorium on the Hattiesburg campus. This event, “An Evening with Roxane Gay,” is free and open to the public and will also be livestreamed; visit the forum page to sign up for a reminder or to access the event online.

Gay is the winner of two Lambda Literary Awards and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir, is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was included in Queerty’s list of 50 heroes who are “leading the nation toward equality, acceptance and dignity for all people." Bad Feminist, described in Time magazine as “a manual on how to be human,” is considered a quintessential study of modern feminism. It was followed by works such as Difficult Women, a collection of short stories, and Hunger, a memoir about food, weight, and Gay’s struggles to embrace a positive image of herself and her body following sexual assault. 

A former professor of English, Gay was the first Black woman to lead a Marvel title, writing a comic series in the Black Panther universe called World of Wakanda. She is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times; writes a newsletter, “The Audacity”; and hosts an award-winning podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda.

University Forum is presented by the USM Honors College. Visit the University forum page for more information.  For questions about this event and other University Forum programming, email forumFREEMississippi; or visit the University Forum on Facebook page or on the University Forum Instagram page.