In response to Simon & Schuster’s recent $250k deal with Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, Roxane Gay has pulled her upcoming release “How to be Heard” from the publishing house’s schedule.
Talking with Buzzfeed, Gay said she was uncomfortable turning in her book in light of Yiannopoulos’ new deal. “I was supposed to turn the book in this month and I kept thinking about how egregious it is to give someone like Milo a platform for his blunt, inelegant hate and provocation. I just couldn’t bring myself to turn the book in.”
A alt-right Conservative, Yiannopoulos has been banned from Twitter for his involvement in the racist cyber-bullying case against comedienne Leslie Jones.
Simon & Schuster has been met with outrage and upset over the Yiannopoulos deal, which prompted Jones to tweet “I literally want to put hands to a jaw right now.”
Gay is an associate professor of English at Purdue University, contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press. Her work has been published in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, and Difficult Women and Hunger forthcoming in 2017. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel.