Esteemed New York Times best-selling author Roxane Gay to speak at Berea College convocation

Writer, professor, editor and social commentator Roxane Gay will speak at the Berea College convocations on Thursday, March 2 sponsored by the bell hooks center as part of the center’s March 2023 programming calendar.

Gay will join bell hooks center founder and director, M. Shadee Malaklou, for a conversation about hooks’ fearless feminism. Entitled “Writing Toward a Better World,” the pair will think and dream with hooks about how to write toward a better world, addressing topics ranging from trauma to love to how we dismantle the intersecting structures of oppression that hooks names “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

Gay’s writing appears in “Best American Mystery Stories 2014,” “Best American Short Stories 2012,” “Best Sex Writing 2012,” “A Public Space,” “McSweeney’s,” “Tin House,” “Oxford American,” “American Short Fiction,” “Virginia Quarterly Review” and many more publications. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books “Ayiti,” “An Untamed State,” the New York Times bestselling “Bad Feminist” and “Hunger,” and the nationally bestselling “Difficult Women.” She is also the author of “World of Wakanda” for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also working on television and film projects. In addition, she has a newsletter, “The Audacity” and a podcast, “The Roxane Gay Agenda.”

The convocation begins at 3 p.m. in Phelps Stokes Chapel and is free and open to the public.

On Wednesday, March 15, the bell hooks center will host Jennifer Marley for its Gender Talk series. Gender Talk is a monthly series for which the bell hooks center invites distinguished feminist scholars to speak with Berea’s campus and community about contemporary issues. Marley is the co-founder of a popular podcast about indigenous life-worlds, named “The Red Nation Podcast” and is a doctoral student specializing in queer indigenous studies and indigenous feminism. The event will be from noon to 1 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

The following week, on Thursday, March 23, the bell hooks center will host a colloquium event with poet and writer Damaris Hill, who was a friend of bell hooks’. The colloquium series provides an opportunity for students to learn more about how they might apply feminism to their personal and professional practices. The event will be from noon to 1 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Finally, on Wednesday, March 29, the bell hooks center will host a student activist talk with international Ukrainian Berea College student Anya Kasianova, a member of the Class of 2024. The event will be from noon to 1 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

More information about the bell hooks center can be found here.

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