*JOIN US* for an event in collaboration with the RI Center For The Book and Reading Across RI celebrating Tochi Onyebuchi's new book, GOLIATH (Tor, Jan. 2022)! The event will include a reading and conversation between Onyebuchi and storyteller and educator Jonathan Pitts-Wiley with Amy VanderWeele, the Reading Across RI Chair, moderating. We hope to see you there! Our virtual events are hosted on Crowdcast.
*ABOUT GOLIATH*
"In this ambitious novel, dense with perspectives and social commentary, Onyebuchi dreams up disparate lives in a crumbling future America—with gentrifiers returning to Earth from space colonies and laborers trying to make a precarious living—while leaving room for moments of beauty and humor."—The New York Times, Editors' Choice
In his adult novel debut, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Award finalist and ALA Alex and New England Book Award winner Tochi Onyebuchi delivers a sweeping science fiction epic in the vein of Samuel R. Delany and Station Eleven.
In the 2050s, Earth has begun to empty. Those with the means and the privilege have departed the great cities of the United States for the more comfortable confines of space colonies. Those left behind salvage what they can from the collapsing infrastructure. As they eke out an existence, their neighborhoods are being cannibalized. Brick by brick, their houses are sent to the colonies, what was once a home now a quaint reminder for the colonists of the world that they wrecked.
A primal biblical epic flung into the future, Goliath weaves together disparate narratives—a space-dweller looking at New Haven, Connecticut as a chance to reconnect with his spiraling lover; a group of laborers attempting to renew the promises of Earth’s crumbling cities; a journalist attempting to capture the violence of the streets; a marshal trying to solve a kidnapping—into a richly urgent mosaic about race, class, gentrification, and who is allowed to be the hero of any history.
*ABOUT TOCHI ONYEBUCHI*
Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African; its sequel, Crown of Thunder; and War Girls. His novella Riot Baby, a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Ignyte, and NAACP Image Awards, won the New England Book Award for Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, and an Alex Award. He holds a B.A. from Yale, an M.F.A. in screenwriting from the Tisch School of the Arts, a master’s degree in economic law from Sciences Po, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. His fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, Omenana, Uncanny, and Lightspeed. His nonfiction has appeared on Tor.com and in Nowhere, the Oxford University Press blog, and the Harvard Journal of African American Policy, among other places.
*ABOUT JONATHAN PITTS-WILEY*
Jonathan Pitts-Wiley is a father, husband, storyteller, and educator. A 2007 Yale graduate, he has been the Artistic Director of Pawtucket, RI’s Mixed Magic Theatre since 2010.
In the fall of 2021, Jonathan was named Creative Director at Curiosity & Co., a bookstore, wine bar and cultural center in Jamestown, RI. Before taking on this role, he served for seven years on the faculty at Moses Brown School as an Upper School History teacher.
An avid portrait photographer, Jonathan co-founded The Vanta Guild, a collective of Rhode Island-based Black photographers, in the spring of 2020.
Jonathan is married to Mixed Magic Theatre’s music director Kim Morrison Pitts-Wiley. The couple has two children, Corinne and Joshua.