Stories Spark Change: Roxane Gay in Conversation with Eternity Martis

Stories Spark Change: Roxane Gay in Conversation with Eternity Martis on January 27, 6:30 - 8:00 pm EST 2022

Join internationally renowned author Roxane Gay and best-selling author Eternity Martis for an in-depth conversation about how we can address how we police ourselves as survivors to reclaim our story and push back against shame to create space for healing. As survivors, we may internalize the lie that our pleasure, needs and healing are too much of a burden. Stories Spark Change is an opportunity to explore letting go of guilt and blame, knowing that sexual violence is never our fault. This night will be a celebration of healing, self-love, and pleasure.   

Stories Spark Change Organizing Committee: Ryerson University, Laurier University, Carleton University, Queen's University, McMaster University, University of Guelph, University of Windsor, University of Toronto, York University.

Stories Spark Change is part of Consent Action Week, an educational initiative held during the last week of January at universities across Ontario. The week is an opportunity for campus communities to create a dialogue about consent, pleasure, relationships and increase understanding of sexual violence. It's also an opportunity to raise awareness of both on and off-campus services. The Ontario University Sexual Violence Network created Consent Action Week. 

Accessibility Note: The webinar will be conducted primarily in spoken English. Live captioning in English will be available. American Sign Language can be made available upon request. Requests may be submitted in the registration form or by email at osvse@torontomu.ca. Please submit language accessibility requests at least 3 business days before the event. Please note that we may not be able to fulfill requests received within less than 3 business days of an event. 

Roxane Gay is an author and cultural critic whose writing is unmatched and widely revered. Her work garners international acclaim for its reflective, no-holds-barred exploration of feminism and social criticism. With a deft eye on modern culture, she brilliantly critiques its ebb and flow with both wit and ferocity.

Words like “courage,” “humor,” and “smart” are frequently deployed when describing Roxane. Her collection of essays, Bad Feminist, is universally considered the quintessential exploration of modern feminism. NPR named it one of the best books of the year and Salon declared the book “trailblazing.” Her powerful debut novel, An Untamed State, was long listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. In 2017, Roxane released her bestselling memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, which was called “Luminous…intellectually rigorous and deeply moving” by the New York Times. She also released her collection of short stories, Difficult Women. The Los Angeles Times says of the collection, “There’s a distinct echo of Angela Carter or Helen Oyeyemi at play; dark fables and twisted morality tales sit alongside the contemporary and the realistic…”

In 2018, she released Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, a valuable and searing anthology; it has been described as “essential reading” and a “call to arms” by its readers. In 2020, Roxane released Graceful Burdens, an incisive collection of funny, enraging, and hopeful stories of women’s empowerment and escape, as well as a graphic novel called The Sacrifice of Darkness. Roxane was the first black woman to ever write for Marvel, writing a comic series in the Black Panther universe called World of Wakanda.

Roxane co-hosts Hear to Slay with Tressie McMillan Cottom – a podcast with an intersectional perspective on celebrity, culture, politics, art, life, love, and more. She also pens the “work friend” advice column for the New York Times, and in 2021 she began her own publishing imprint with Grove Atlantic, “Roxane Gay Books.” She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects.

ETERNITY MARTIS is an award-winning Toronto-based journalist and editor. She was a 2017 National Magazine Awards finalist for Best New Writer and the 2018 winner of the Canadian Online Publishing Awards for Best Investigative Article. Her writing has appeared in Vice, Huffington Post, The Walrus, CBC, Hazlitt, The Fader, Salon, and on academic syllabuses around the world. Her work on race and language has influenced media style guide changes across the country. She is the course developer and instructor of Reporting On Race: The Black Community in the Media at Ryerson University, the first of its kind in Canada, and the 2021 Asper Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2020, she was named one of Canada's Top 100 Most Powerful Women by the Women's Executive Network.

Her bestselling debut memoir, They Said This Would Be Fun, about being a woman of colour at a predominantly white university, recently won the Kobo Emerging Writer's Prize for Nonfiction, and was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Globe and Mail, CBC, Chapters/Indigo, Apple and Audible.