Join us for an evening with A.E. Osworth discussing their book, “We Are Watching Eliza Bright,” in conversation with Liberty Hardy, senior contributing editor for Book Riot.

In this thrilling story of survival and anger, a woman has her whole life turned upside down after speaking out against workplace hostility–and inadvertently becomes the leader of a cultural movement. Eliza Bright is living the dream as an elite video game coder at Fancy Dog Games, the first woman to ascend that high in the ranks—and some people want to make sure she’s the last. To her friends, Eliza Bright is a brilliant, self-taught coder bravely calling out the misogyny that pervades her workplace and industry. To the men who see her very presence as a threat, Eliza Bright is a woman who needs to be destroyed to protect the game they love. When Eliza’s report of workplace harassment is quickly dismissed, she’s forced to take her frustrations to a journalist who blasts her story across the internet. She’s fired and doxxed, and becomes a rallying figure for women everywhere. But she’s also enraged the beast comprised of online male gamers—their unreliable chorus narrates our story. Soon, Eliza is in the cross-hairs of the gaming community, threatened and stalked as they monitor her every move online and across New York City. As the violent power of the angry male collective descends upon everyone in Eliza’s life, it becomes increasingly difficult to know who to trust, even when she’s eventually taken in and protected by an under-the-radar Collective known as the Sixsterhood. The violence moves from cyberspace to the real world, thanks to a vicious male super-fan known only as The Inspectre, determined to exact his revenge on behalf of men everywhere. We watch alongside the Sixsterhood and subreddit keyboard warriors as this dramatic cat-and-mouse game plays out to its violent and inevitable conclusion in this thrilling story of resilience and survival.

A.E. Osworth is Part-Time Faculty at The New School, where they teach undergraduates both fiction and the art of digital storytelling and previously served as Education Director of WriteOn. Their novel, We Are Watching Eliza Bright, about a game developer dealing with harassment (and narrated collectively by a fictional subreddit) was released in April 2021. They spent seven years working for Autostraddle in varying roles, including as Contributor, Staff Writer, and Geekery Editor, where they mainly focused on the intersection of queerness and technology. They also edited cartoons and wrote about relationships and whiskey. In addition, you can find their work on Guernica, Quartz, Electric Lit, Paper Darts, Mashable, drDoctor and Argot Magazine. You can take classes with them at Catapult, where they’re leading fiction- and literature-focused courses, and at Fledgling, where they lead the creative-non-fiction-focused generative workshops.

This is a First Friday partnership program with Print: A Bookstore.

This event is free and open to the public; pre-registration is required. Visit Print’s website here to register and receive the Zoom meeting link.