She is both utterly without shame when it comes to exposing the most raw parts of her psyche and, she says, painfully shy. Roxane Gay is many things-critic, social media firebrand, college English professor, self-described 'love child' of Beyoncé and Ina Garten, bisexual Haitian American PhD, and romance-novel fan. This article originally appears in the July 2017 issue of ELLE.