Roxane Gay launches audacious new project
The best-selling author and intellectual shares her thoughts and others’, directly to your inbox.
New York Times best-selling writer Roxane Gay has launched The Audacity, a newsletter featuring frequent new writing from Gay, essays from emerging writers, a book club spotlighting vital and underrepresented voices, and more.
Gay honed her ability to converge candid personal storytelling and piercing cultural insight in the early days of blog culture. She would continue to expand this approach as she became one of today’s most acclaimed writers (essays, fiction, memoir, and comics) and leading intersectional feminist voices. The Audacity is a return to her self-publishing origins and Gay describes the inspiration for the project:
“I’ve been thinking about blogs lately because I miss them. I am very attached to things that fade into obsolescence. For years, I wrote an obscure little blog few people read and that was mostly fine because I could share my thoughts with myself and three or four other people. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was also growing as a writer, thinking more about how to tell a story, how to get readers to care about the story.
“People curate what they put from their lives into the public sphere but a good writer makes what they curate one hell of a story. That’s what I hope to do with this newsletter—tell one hell of a story about the world we’re living in, the culture we consume, the things that bring me joy, the things that infuriate me, the things I think we should talk about.”
Roxane gay
Every two weeks, The Audacity will feature an essay from an emerging writer (someone with three or fewer publications) and share a brief interview with them. Complementing the newsletter is The Audacious Book Club, co-directed by Gay and Kaitlyn Adams, which will feature a new book, and an online discussion, every month. The Book Club will be open to paid subscribers, who will, when the authors are willing and able to join, have access to a live Zoom conversation between Gay and that writer.
About Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects.
About Substack
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