Roxane Gay in Conversation with Katia D. Ulysse
Roxane Gay, award-winning author of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017), Difficult Women (2017), and Bad Feminist (2014) and Katia D. Ulysse, Haitian poet, essayist and author of Drifting (2014), among other works, will join us for a reading and conversation in the Critical Caribbean Feminisms series. Following the reading, Gay, Ulysse, and BCRW Associate Director Tami Navarro will discuss various forms of writing–including novels, memoir, and social media interventions–and examine how these create space for conversations around and advocacy for social justice.
This event is free and open to the public. All advance tickets have been claimed. A limited number of tickets will be available and released on a first-come, first-seated basis. For more information, visit the CUNY Grad Center event page.
About the Speakers
Roxane Gay is an author and cultural critic whose writing is unmatched and widely revered. Her work garners international acclaim for its reflective, no-holds-barred exploration of feminism and social criticism. With a deft eye on modern culture, she brilliantly critiques its ebb and flow with both wit and ferocity.
Words like “courage,” “humor,” and “smart” are frequently deployed when describing Roxane. Her collection of essays, Bad Feminist, is universally considered the quintessential exploration of modern feminism. NPR named it one of the best books of the year and Salon declared the book “trailblazing.” Her powerful debut novel, An Untamed State, was long listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. In 2017, Roxane released her highly anticipated memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, as well as a collection of short stories titled Difficult Women.
Roxane is a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times, was the co-editor of PANK, and formerly was the non-fiction editor at The Rumpus. Her writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nation and many other publications. She recently became the first black woman to ever write for Marvel, writing a comic series in the Black Panther universe called World of Wakanda. Roxane fronts a small army of avid fans on social media and when she finds the time, she dominates the occasional Scrabble tournament.
Katia D. Ulysse was born in Haiti, and came to the United States as a teen with not a single word of English in her pocket. She earned a BA in English Literature, a Master’s in Teaching, and numerous certifications in the field of education. Over the course of fifteen years, Ms. Ulysse taught English to hundreds of immigrants and refugees from countries around the globe, including Vietnam, Syria, Somalia, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and more. She worked in Baltimore City’s toughest schools for 15 years, advocating for at-risk students. Her experiences as an immigrant and teacher are strongly represented in her short stories, personal essays, Pushcart-nominated poetry, and music. Ulysse’s critically-acclaimed story collection, Drifting, and her new novel, Mouths Don’t Speak. continue to draw high praise from literary critics. Her work appear or will appear in the following literary journals and anthologies: The Caribbean Writer, Smartish Pace, Phoebe, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; Mozayik: Yon Konbit Literè —a groundbreaking anthology in Haitian Kreyòl; The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Haiti Noir I, and Haiti Noir II—edited by celebrated Haitian Author, Edwidge Danticat. Ulysse served as Goucher College’s Spring 2017 Kratz Writer in Residence, where she taught advanced creative writing. She has written two books for children. She is currently at work on another short story collection. Mouths Don’t Speak is her first novel.
