Virginia Eubanks

Virginia Eubanks is a longform investigative reporter, essayist, memoirist, and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving: Lessons on Love and Survival (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2026). She is also the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor; Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age; and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Her investigative reporting and personal essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, The Nation, Harper’s, and Wired. With Andrea Quijada, she is gathering oral histories of the global automated welfare state for Voice of Witness. She has been a fellow or resident at MacDowell, Edward Albee, New America, Carey Institute for Global Good, and Blue Mountain Center. When not sleeping in her truck in the Adirondacks, she lives in Troy, New York.