Winner of the 2014 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, Childress’s debut novel looks at how we use technology to do our dirty jobs for us—one of which is to conceal from ourselves exactly what we are doing. Childress, who has worked in a variety of communications and marketing capacities, focuses on a drone pilot in Nevada and a big-data worker on Wall Street. As the two narratives unfold, both characters find that they not only use the new technology but are used by it, and that the algorithms are as treacherous as the remote weaponry.
Childress will be in conversation with Tope Folarin, winner of the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing for his story "Miracle." In 2014, he was named to Africa39's list of most promising African writers under forty.
This event is part of the Politics & Prose and the PEN/Faulkner Foundation Contemporary Fiction Reading Series at Busboys and Poets.
