The feminist author and commentator Roxane Gay has pulled publication of her forthcoming book from Simon & Schuster in protest of its support of the notorious “alt-right” figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos.

“I just couldn’t bring myself to turn the book in,” Gay said in a statement to BuzzFeed News, explaining that her upcoming book How to Be Heard was to be published through TED Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

“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,” she said.

Yiannopoulos gained public notoriety after he was banned from Twitter for leading a racist and sexist campaign against the female-starring Ghostbusters reboot and the Saturday Night Live comedian Leslie Jones.

His book Dangerous received a $250,000 advance from Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, horrifying many in the publishing industry. The editor of the Chicago Review of Books announced the publication would not review any Simon & Schuster books this year because the company “peddles hate speech for profit”.

But Gay, an associate professor at Purdue University, a New York Times columnist and the author of multiple books, including Bad Feminist, a bestselling 2014 collection of essays, is the first major author to stop her publishing relationship with the company.

“I can afford to take this stand. Not everyone can. Remember that,” she tweeted.

Her decision follows a letter sent to authors by the Simon & Schuster president and CEO, Carolyn Reidy, reassuring them of the book’s content. “I want to make it clear that we do not support or condone, nor will we publish, hate speech,” she wrote. “Not from our authors. Not in our books. Not at our imprints. Not from our employees and not in our workplace.”