Laila Lalami n conversation with UAlbany Political Science Professor Virginia Eubanks, author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (2018)

4:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Conversation / Q&A
University at Albany
Multi-Purpose Room, Campus Center West
1400 Washington Avenue Albany NY 12222

Laila Lalami, major contemporary author, will present her new dystopian sci-fi novel, The Dream Hotel (2025), about a near-future world in which the surveillance state uses technology to spy on dreams. Jennifer Egan called it, “A gripping, Kafkaesque foray into an all-too-plausible future where data collection penetrates interior life.”

Lalami is the bestselling author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, winner of the Arab American Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and The Other Americans, a finalist for the National Book Award.

NPR called her a “maestra of literary fiction.” Her acclaimed nonfiction book, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America (2020), explores the struggles of new immigrants to achieve the full rights of citizenship — drawing on her own experiences as a female, Muslim Moroccan-American.

Presented by the NYS Writers Institute and cosponsored by the AI Plus Institute, UAlbany's hub for interdisciplinary AI research. For more events, visit www.albany.edu/ai-plus/institute.
Also cosponsored by the Honors College and the School of Criminal Justice’s “Justice and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century Project.”