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While at EIU, she was a contributing editor for Bluestem magazine, and she also founded Tiny Hardcore Press. Career Īfter completing her Ph.D., Gay began her academic teaching career in 2010 at Eastern Illinois University, where she was assistant professor of English. Ann Brady served as her dissertation advisor. Her dissertation is titled Subverting the Subject Position: Toward a New Discourse About Students as Writers and Engineering Students as Technical Communicators. She was inducted into the Omicron Delta Kappa Circle. in Rhetoric and Technical Communication in 2010. Gay attended graduate school at Michigan Technological University in 2008, where she earned a Ph.D. She completed her undergraduate degree at Vermont College of Norwich University, and also earned a master's degree with an emphasis in creative writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Gay began her undergraduate studies at Yale University, but dropped out in her junior year to pursue a relationship in Arizona. Her parents were relatively wealthy, supporting her through college and paying her rent until she was 30. Gay began writing essays as a teenager, with much of her early work being influenced by her experience with childhood sexual violence.
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She attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Gay was raised Roman Catholic and spent her summers visiting family in Haiti. Her mother was a homemaker and her father is owner of GDG Béton et Construction, a Haitian concrete company. I tell a group of girls at a quiz show in Gowanus.Gay was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to Michael and Nicole Gay, both of Haitian descent. I tell my cousin as we sit on the stoop at the end of the evening. I tell my friends in Manhattan, for whom I was bound. I tell everyone about the man on the tracks. We are on the train, bound for Manhattan. Away from the man who was on the tracks, the man who is now on the platform, yelling, “Train!” The man whose windbreaker is being held, the man someone is coming for, who someone must be coming for. He is wearing athletic clothes with vertical stripes. He does not know what has happened, what is happening. The man who was on the tracks does not smell like alcohol. I say, “No, you cannot get on the train.” The man dives forward again, toward the door, toward me. The man who was on the tracks dives toward the open doors and yells, “Train!” Someone behind him clutches his gray windbreaker. The man who was on the tracks, who has the face of a baby, stands on the platform. They were there and now they are not there. I want them to give me beauty, symmetry, meaning. I want the men to disperse in three directions, in a T, each shaking his head. The three men circle the man who was on the tracks. What do I call the man on the tracks if he is no longer on the tracks? Who is he now? Illustration by Sam Pash The Manhattan-bound A train has stopped short. The three of them raise the man from the tracks. He might weigh three hundred pounds he might weigh more. I stand five feet from the men on the platform. The two men on the platform grip the man’s arms. These men, who do not know each other, could be calling to a child.
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You can hear them call to the man on the tracks. You can watch two men stand at the edge of the platform. You can stare at the man, who now stands before you, on the tracks. You can listen to the Manhattan-bound A train barrel down. You can gasp when the man steps over the electrified third rail. You can widen your eyes when the man stumbles in your direction, toward the platform where you await the Manhattan-bound A. You can exhale when the Brooklyn-bound A stops twenty feet short. You can grip your New Yorker and suck in your breath. When you watch a man on the tracks before an oncoming train, that’s exactly what you do: watch. "When you watch a man on the tracks before an oncoming train, that’s exactly what you do: watch."