A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving
at Writers & Books (740 University Ave, Rochester, NY 14607)
and available in a virtual livestream: livestream tickets here.
Virginia Eubanks will be joined in conversation by writer and physician, Trisha Paul
As disarmingly funny as it is quietly wise, A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving is the story—heart-wrenching and all too relatable—of how one woman tried to save her beloved and learned that she would also have to save herself. It is a moving, hopeful love story about two people caught in their own kind of wilderness, trying not just to survive but to truly care for each other. Built from cataclysmic loss and tenacious love, A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving challenges readers to reconsider the ways in which we tend our loved ones and ourselves, and it reminds us: no one survives the wilderness alone.
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 Nature. 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, NY.
Trisha Paul is a pediatric oncologist and palliative care physician and a writer at University of Rochester Medicine. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from NYU, and her writing has appeared in anthologies and medical journals such as JAMA. She is a Field Notes Editor for Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. Paul loves caring for her Little Free Library, dancing barefoot, and collecting anything made of cork. She lives in Rochester, NY with her family.
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A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving
This is a live event at Writers and Books and will be Live Streamed.
Reserve ticket(s) for the Live Stream HERE.
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