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One of the most prolific writers of our generation talks about not wanting her parents to read her work, insomnia, and having a Scrabble nemesis. This year, the inimitable Roxane Gay will publish two new books: An Untamed Stateher debut novel out earlier this month that has been selected by Library Journal as one of the spring's best debuts, and Bad Feministan essay collection slated to be published in August.

Gay is best known in the blogosphere and among the Twitterati for her sharp wit and affecting honesty, and for consistently publishing amazing work. She teaches writing at Eastern Illinois University much of the time, but she has also been essays editor for The Rumpusco-editor of PANKan editor for a Salon series on feminists of color, and much more.

Her short stories, published along with a collection that included poetry and nonfiction in called Ayiti bad femiinist roxne gay buzzfeed, have been included in the Best American Short Stories series, Necessary Fictionand other publications. I interviewed her about how she works and her new books.

How do you do everything? How is this humanly possible? Roxane Gay: I live in the middle of nowhere and I'm an insomniac, I guess. I just make the time and I read and write really fast so that makes a lot possible for me. I wish I had an explanation for it. I'm grateful for it.

RG: Fiction is my happy place. I love writing nonfiction too; It's just a different muscle. There's an urgency that has to be satisfied. RG: It started as a short story, "Things I Know About Fairy Tales," a story about a woman who was kidnapped and the main character wouldn't leave me alone.

Roxane Gay

I wanted to look at how violence is born in a country like Haiti. The men in the book have as much range as the women. That balance is uncommon in literature — was it intentional? RG: All too often men are uniform characters and that's not realistic. The men are human beings.

There was some seamless point of view shifting in the book. Did you decide that before you began writing or did it happen during the writing? RG: The story becomes claustrophobic and dark. When I wrote the first draft in first person, it was too much. To air the chapters out, I decided to shift the point of view.

There is a lot of harrowing, potentially triggering writing in it. How did you deal with that personally? RG: Writing some of the darker scenes were hard, but I allowed myself to go there. Plenty of violence in books and film are unreadable and unwatchable.

I wanted to convey what would it feel like to be in this situation.