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Since 2014, when her essay collection and novel put her on the literary map, she has been “living a dream I did not even know I had,” she said. “I made the time to write whether I was in high school or college or grad school, working an overnight shift in a video store, or as a bartender … I was able to honor this commitment to my craft because writing was, and is, my true north.” “No matter what I had going on, I wrote and I read and I wrote and I read,” she said. Her parents encouraged her to consider a career as a doctor, lawyer or engineer – what she called “the Haitian career trifecta.” But after some starts and stops in college, writing eventually won out.Ĭonvocation Committee Chair Hassaan Bin Sabir ’21, center, gives the class address alongside fellow committee members Gloria Oladipo ’21, left, and Sarah Brice ’21. In her youth, she said, if little else was reliable, writing always was.
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Instead, I say that to mean we are all more than our suffering.” “And I don’t say that to minimize my trauma or anyone else’s. “Bad things happened to all of us,” she said. Like many, she said, she has been changed by trauma. I took that carefree energy to my writing the borders of my imagination expanded.” “Adults never interfered with these magical places,” she said. Her imagination and love of storytelling was born in those worlds.
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They also spent hours exploring the abandoned appliances and car parts in a nearby patch of woods. It also made me work harder.”Īs a child, she and her brothers would create imaginary worlds, she said, digging holes in an adjacent empty lot and connecting them with ravines so they could visit one another. “There was a time, in my 20s and 30s, where rejection was constant,” she said. Gay began her remarks by recalling her lifelong desire to be a writer, even when encouragement and validation were in short supply. But most importantly, if there’s any lesson I’ve learned over the last four years, and over the pandemic in particular, it’s that I need other people to sustain me, to make me more human … and to get me through the every day. “I’m 22, and I’m still figuring it all out. “Here’s why: I just don’t think I know more about life than the rest of you,” Bin Sabir said. He broke with tradition, however, and gave his speech alongside fellow committee members Sarah Brice ’21 and Gloria Oladipo ’21, who also spoke. Pollack, after which Convocation Committee Chair Hassaan Bin Sabir ’21 gave the class address. Minter’s reading was followed by welcoming remarks from President Martha E. “Farewell to the hill, look how far we’ve come / From the analyst to the actor, the future doctors to the diplomats / The engineers to the athletes, tell your story wherever you go,” he read. The recorded event, which will be available to the public on CornellCast in June, began with a reading from Laurence Minter ’21 of his poem, “History is Ours”: Gay’s address to the senior class touched on her childhood on her determination to be a writer in the face of constant rejection and doubts on the realities of “a flawed and unjust world” that rewards the mediocrity of the majority and punishes the marginalized and on her hopes for the graduating class. Gay, a New York Times contributing opinion writer and visiting professor at Yale University, is the author of “Bad Feminist” (2014), the New York Times bestselling essay collection, as well as the 2014 novel “An Untamed State” and her 2017 memoir, “Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.” She recently began her own publishing imprint, Roxane Gay Books, with publisher Grove Atlantic. Ryan Lombardi, vice president for student and campus life, delivers remarks at the close of the virtual Convocation ceremony.
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Credit: Lindsay France/Cornell University