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I am fine with my books being categorized as African-American literature but I hope they are also considered Haitian-American literature and American literature. All of these things are part of who I am and what I write.

Roxane Gay

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Roxane Gay
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: October 15
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Scrabble Player
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Things
Literature
American
Hope
Categorized
Write
Haitian
Part
African
Also
Considered
Book
Fine
Writing
Books

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Truth can hurt so very much.
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Violence is not the answer but neither is peace.
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Readers need to stop assuming characters are white if race isn't explicitly defined.
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The other day, I saw a blog post where a woman wrote about why she was unfollowing me and that made me feel incredibly self-conscious and embarrassed about my tweets. I also feel more exposed now that I've become a more visible writer but then I try to get over all that and just use Twitter the way I want.
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I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem.
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What is it like to be connected to someone you can never get away from, for better or worse? I love trying to answer that question.
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Most of my favorite tweets go completely ignored but most of my favorite tweets are probably really lame or inside jokes between me and my [redacted]. See what I did there?
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I am a bad feminist and a good woman. I am trying to become better in how I think and say and do - without abandoning what makes me human.
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Oftentimes, when a woman demands accountability, respect, or consideration, she is crazy or nagging or whatever.
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With my writing, I generally just pretend that no one's reading it. I allow myself that delusion so that I can write the things that I write.
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I would like to believe that most people, regardless of gender, are good and kind. The good men in my stories are the rule. It's the bad men that are the exception and because I tend toward the dark in my fiction, you see more of the exception than the rule.
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Most of the time, writing is a lot of fun, and not a small amount of self-medication.
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I live in the middle of nowhere and I'm an insomniac. I just make the time and I read and write really fast so that makes a lot possible for me. I wish I had an explanation for it. I'm grateful for it.
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I see my tweets as a current joining a bunch of other currents in the world's craziest ocean.
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People do terrible things all the time, but we don’t regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things.
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I am interested in intense, unbreakable emotional connections and oftentimes, such connections can be found between siblings.
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You don't necessarily have to do anything once you acknowledge your privilege. You don't have to apologize for it. You need to understand the extent of your privilege, the consequences of your privilege, and remain aware that people who are different from you move through and experience the world in ways you might never know anything about.
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I'm fat positive, in that I don't see fat as a bad thing. But what I do see as a bad thing is how I'm treated. I can have the most positive outlook in the world, but that is not going to change how hecklers and people walking down the street are yelling at me.
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Somewhere along the line we started misinterpreting the First Amendment and this idea of the freedom of speech the amendment grants us. We are free to speak as we choose without fear of prosecution or persecution, but we are not free to speak as we choose without consequence.
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Feminism is definitely a part of everything I do.
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