Please join the Department of English Visiting Writers Series for a reading with journalist and author Vauhini Vara.
Vara is the author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, which won the Porchlight Business Book Award and was named one of the ten best books of the year by Publisher’s Weekly. Her previous books are This Is Salvaged, which was longlisted for the Story Prize and won the High Plains Book Award, and The Immortal King Rao, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also a journalist, for publications including Businessweek, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. She mentors writers on book-length projects through the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project and the Look2Justice Free Thinker Book Fellowship.
In Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, Vara interrogates how technologies have influenced her understanding of her self and the world around her, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter, to asking ChatGPT for writing advice—while compelling her to add to the trove of human-created material exploited for corporations’ financial gain. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life. Searches illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence, while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.
This reading is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a Q&A. To attend, please register here. You will receive a link for the Zoom reading once you have registered.
