Black queer writer Roxane Gay to receive award for outstanding service to literature

Black queer feminist writer Roxane Gay will receive the 2025 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, a lifetime achievement award, the National Book Foundation announced Wednesday.

Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.

Gay is an author of both novels and nonfiction, including the essay collection Bad Feminist and the memoir Hunger. She is also the author of Ayiti, An Untamed State, Difficult Women, and, most recently, Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business.

She is the editor of Roxane Gay Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic dedicated to publishing works by Black writers and writers of colors, queer writers, writers with disabilities, writers from varied economic backgrounds, and those who live at the intersections of multiple marginalized identities. Since 2024, Roxane Gay Books has published three novels, with four titles forthcoming.

She is a mentor for Grove Atlantic’s annual editorial fellowship, which provides aspiring publishing professionals paid career experience. She also publishes the Audacity newsletter and the Rumpus literary magazine; she owns the latter with her wife, Debbie Millman. She was the 2022-2025 Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University.

Related: We Sat Down With Roxane Gay to Talk About Sex, Love, and Soul Mates

“As a writer, professor, editor, and cultural critic, Roxane Gay has intentionally and artfully carved out spaces to create opportunities for writers, readers, and emerging publishing professionals of all backgrounds in the literary world, and we will continue to reap the benefits of her achievements for generations,” David Steinberger, chair of the board of directors of the National Book Foundation, said in a press release. “It is an honor to recognize Roxane Gay’s extraordinary contributions to the literary community at the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony this November.”

National Book Award Winner Jacqueline Woodson will present Gay with the award at the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner November 19. The award includes a $10,000 grant.

When National Book Foundation Executive Director Ruth Dickey called to tell Gay about the award, Gay initially thought Dickey wanted her to be on a committee, she told the Los Angeles Times. Since Gay realized she was receiving the award, she has had to remind herself “how wonderful it is — these moments don’t come often,” she said.

Gay said she doesn’t consider herself an activist, although she is “always trying to arc towards a greater good in everything I do.” Real activists, she told the Times, “are putting their lives on the line every day. Writing an essay about issues I care about just doesn’t rise to that level.”

Those issues include feminism, sexuality, her relationship with her body, and sexual assault — she was gang-raped at age 12. “There’s a before and an after,” she wrote in Hunger. “In the after, I was broken, shattered, and silent. ... I became nothing.” She became a compulsive eater “so my body could become so big it would never be broken again.”

But she aims to write about lighter subjects too. She is collaborating with actor Channing Tatum on a sexy romance novel to be published in 2026. “So much of what I write about is incredibly depressing and incredibly difficult, whether sexual violence or voting disparities or racial injustice and police brutality,” she told the Times. “So I always try to balance the darkness with hopefully some light and joy.”