Working Titles 19 - Bird Girl

When the protagonist of BIrd Girl, whose job it is to find and salvage lost or abandoned scooters, finds a crashed rider along with her errant scooter, her life quickly proves the point of real-world privacy activists: that privacy is a worthy goal even if you think you have nothing to hide. Upon realizing that the fallen rider is a “masker,” or someone who synthetically alters her features to outsmart facial recognition systems, the protagonist makes a fateful decision, which sets her on course to become a persona non grata in a highly connected society, where a single misstep can lead to the loss of income and personhood—and even potentially the loss of life. Avital Balwit is a writer from Portland, Oregon. She has short stories forthcoming in Lilith Magazine, Prairie Fire, and the "Multispecies Cities" anthology from Worldweaver Press. She won The Atlantic's 2020 poetry contest. Her illustrated children's book on octopus cognition will be published by Pop Up UK in Spring 2021. Avital is a Rhodes scholar studying political philosophy.