Roxane Gay is the award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of Hunger and other nonfiction works like essay collection Bad Feminist (2014). Gay also published fictional works like debut novel An Untamed State (2014) and many short stories. Outside of books, she hosts a podcast called The Roxane Gay Agenda and publishes a weekly digital newsletter, The Audacity. Gay is the daughter of Haitian immigrants who made their home in the United States; she grew up in Nebraska but frequently moved because of her father’s job. She was raised alongside two younger brothers and was an avid reader in her youth. Gay’s love of books led to her career as a writer and provided her with solace after her rape at 12. This act of sexual violence led Gay to excessively eat so she could transform her body and protect herself from male violence. In this respect, Hunger is very much an act of healing, a written exercise in liberation.