Photo: Jon Tjhia

Roxane Gay’s latest book, a collection of short fiction called Difficult Women. The pages of the book are populated with resilient, perverse, bold, provocative, hilarious and heroic female characters.

It’s some of these very same qualities that have propelled Gay herself to feminist stardom. As a writer, and as a distinctly 21st-century voice in American feminism, Gay embraces complexity and contradiction and packs a powerful rhetorical punch whether she’s writing for Twitter, Tumblr, the New York Times, novels or comic books.

The academic, essayist and novelist rose to prominence in 2015 with the book Bad Feminist – part manifesto, part memoir, part cultural critique – and today has more than 190,000 Twitter followers, tuning in to her thoughts on everything from The Bachelor to American higher education policy. Most recently, she’s been working on an upcoming memoir, Hunger, and co-authoring a Marvel comic, Black Panther: World of Wakanda, with Yona Harvey and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

At Northcote Town Hall, the singular Roxane Gay talks politics, pop culture and Beyoncé with Santilla Chingaipe.