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. Credit: Lindsay France/Cornell University

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