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Write It With Your Whole Chest

Join LA County Librarian and Director, Dr. Skye Patrick, as she sits down with the inimitable Roxane Gay to discuss the power of storytelling.

This discussion will take place on the West Hollywood Park Stage. 

Roxane Gay is an award-winning author, editor, professor, and cultural critic. The New York Times bestselling author has written six critically acclaimed books, including the instant classic Bad Feminist (2014), the memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017), which The New York Times hailed as “luminous…intellectually rigorous and deeply moving,” and the essay collection Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business (2024), which Booklist called “a must-read for not only fans of Gay’s work, but for everyone interested in reading intellectual, accessible, and important takes on timely topics.” 

Roxane has also authored two short story collections, Difficult Women (2017) and Ayiti (2018), the novel An Untamed State (2014), and edited multiple acclaimed and best-selling anthologies including The Portable Feminist Reader for Penguin Classics (2025), Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2019), and The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (2020). Roxane was the first Black woman to lead a Marvel title, writing the comic series World of Wakanda. 

A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Roxane is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where she wrote the Work Friend column. Her work can also be found in The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper's Bazaar, McSweeney's and many other publications. She holds an endowed professorship at Rutgers University and has also taught at Purdue and Yale. She is currently at work on film and television projects, and runs her own publishing imprint, Roxane Gay Books.

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