Overview
Writers Roxane Gay and Akwaeke Emezi join us for the last installment of the I Am America series to discuss shifting cultural views of gender, politics, art, and power. Noreen Tomassi will serve as moderator and host.
Best-selling author Gay is the editor of Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, an anthology of first-person essays published earlier this year which tackles rape, assault, and harassment head-on. Emezi’s groundbreaking debut novel, Freshwater, is the story of a person living outside of our standard ideas of identity.
About the guests:
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. She recently edited Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture.
Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo and Tamil writer and artist based in liminal spaces. Born and raised in Nigeria, she received her MPA from New York University and was awarded a 2015 Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. She won the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa. Her work has been published in various literary magazines, including Granta. Freshwater is her debut novel.