American writer and journalist Roxane Gay was BOTD in 1974. Born in Omaha, Nebraska to middle-class parents of Haitian origin, she studied briefly at Yale University, dropping out to follow her girlfriend to Arizona. She later studied at Norwich University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, before completing a doctorate at Michigan Technological University. After graduation, she worked as an academic, publishing her first short story collection, Ayiti, in 2011, followed by the novel An Untamed State in 2014. She is best known for her 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist, in which she explored the complex terrain of fourth-wave feminism, including her enjoyment of “non-feminist” pop culture including the Fifty Shades of Grey novels and tween TV series Sweet Valley High. Critically praised for her humorous and non-fundamentalist approach to feminist theory, the book became a New York Times bestseller. In 2016, Gay and poet Yona Harvey became the first Black women to be hired as writers for Marvel Comics, co-authoring the Black Panther spin-off comic World of Wakanda, featuring a Black lesbian couple. The series was cancelled after six issues, with Marvel’s vice-president explaining that its readership was uninterested in racial diversity or female characters. Her other publications include the 2017 short story collection Difficult Women, and the memoir Hunger, chronicling her gang rape aged 12 and subsequent weight gain and body image problems. In recent years, she co-founded and edited the online journals Gay Magazine and Unruly Bodies, and the book Girl Crush: Women’s Erotic Fantasies. Gay is currently a professor of media, culture and feminist studies at Rutgers University. Openly bisexual since forever, she is married to artist-writer Debbie Millman.