Roxane Gay at First Parish Church

This event is now on Tuesday, March 25th.

Harvard Book Store welcomes Roxane Gay―culture critic, contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and author of the the New York Times bestsellers Bad Feminist and Hunger, as well as the national bestseller Difficult Women―for a discussion of her new exciting feminist canon The Portable Feminist Reader, which reflects on inclusive historic and modern works and multicultural perspectives. She will be joined in conversation by Cristela Guerra—a senior arts and culture reporter for WBUR and 2024 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Ticketing

Tickets include admission for one and one paperback copy of The Portable Feminist Reader. Following the presentation Roxane Gay will sign copies of her new book.

About The Portable Feminist Reader

A dynamic and strikingly relevant look at a feminist canon as expansive rather than definitive.
For Roxane Gay, a feminist canon is subjective and always evolving. A feminist canon represents a long history of feminist scholarship, embraces skepticism, and invites robust discussion and debate. Selected writings by ancient, historic, and more recent feminist voices include Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Anna Julia Cooper, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Eileen Myles, Mona Eltahawy, bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, The Guerrilla Girls, and many more. With an introduction, headnotes, and an inspired list of multimedia recommendations, Roxane Gay presents multicultural perspectives, ecofeminism, feminism and disability, feminist labor, gender perspectives, and Black feminism. Through the Portable Feminist Reader, readers explore the state of American feminism, its successes and failures, and what feminism looks like in practice, as a complex, contradictory, personal and political, and ever-growing legacy of feminist thought.

Roxane 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 others. 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, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity.

Cristela Guerra is a senior arts and culture reporter for WBUR, a queer Panamanian journalist of color, and a moderator who facilitates and leads conversations around race, identity, and equity. Before working in public radio, she was a newspaper journalist for more than a decade, working at The Boston Globe and The News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida. She was a 2024 Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Her studies examined stories from the diaspora, including those of her own Panamanian heritage, the reasons that compel people to migrate and how those individuals build community and maintain connections to their cultural identity. Her work received a regional and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2014 and most recently received another regional Edward R. Murrow in 2023 as part of “Continuing Coverage” for her work at the U.S.-Mexico border on the journey of Venezuelan migrants. She was chosen as a 2019 Latina Leader by Amplify Latinx and selected by YW Boston to be inducted into its 2023 Academy of Women Achievers and receive the organization’s Sylvia Ferrell-Jones Award. They are the vice-president of the New England Chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and vice-chair of the board at RAW Art Works in Lynn.

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.

Event Venue

First Parish Church, 1446 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, United States