Gay sounds excited when she says she’s “going to be talking about the books themselves. The idea is to engage critically with the actual work of underrepresented writers - to “move beyond the numbers.” The blog will feature mostly reviews and interviews. I’ve accepted that, but what I can do is talk about books.” It’s a moral imperative, and until there’s a financial imperative, they’re not going to change. There’s no financial imperative for them to change. “I kept it pretty short,” she says, “because we know the numbers, and because the numbers don’t move the people in power. Quite honestly, it’s going to take the editors of these major publications just making clear mandates about including diverse coverage.”Īt The Nation, Gay’s short inaugural post updated her count with a few different types of reviewing venues: the 50-year-old New York Review of Books, 19-year-old Bookforum, National Public Radio and the Los Angeles Review of Books, a 17-month-old independent online review. When asked about the response to these earlier essays, Gay, who spoke by phone Tuesday, said she “felt like it brought more awareness to the issue, and people responded really, really well.” But, she says, “It’s certainly going to take more than just a couple blog posts on The Rumpus to really create the change that’s necessary. But at age 12, she was gang-raped by a boy she adored and a group of his.
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After publishing her findings on The Rumpus, Gay crowd-sourced a list of writers of color as a corrective gesture aimed at editors and readers who responded that they just don’t know how to find writers of color. Growing up in suburban Nebraska, Roxane Gay was a happy, straight-A student from a loving family.
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That year, about 12% of the 742 books reviewed by the New York Times were authored by people of color.
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Gay has been down this road before - in the summer of 2012 she counted the number of reviews of books by writers of color in 2011’s New York Times. Gay, author of the story collection “Ayiti” as well as an essayist and editor, has dedicated herself to calling attention to the lack of diversity in the way we talk about books in this country and to pointing readers toward talented writers of color that she says the media is overlooking. Books That Should Be On Your Radar Original Fiction The Writers Bone Interviews The Writers Guide to Music Features Essays The Boneyard Subscribe. For the next two weeks Roxane Gay will be blogging at The Nation about new books by writers of color.