Laura Preston, 2025 Winner
Laura Preston’s background in visual studies influenced her early magazine writing, which considers topics in art and material culture. In 2022, she began covering the artificial intelligence boom, paying similar attention to its immediate physical byproducts. With her signature combination of humor, intellectual seriousness, and a novelist’s eye for unusual characters, Preston is examining how AI, when hastily introduced into a capitalist system, becomes a tool that extracts from the poor, enriches the wealthy, and marginalizes the marginal, all at great cost to the environment.
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With help from the Margolis Award, Preston will continue work on a book for Liveright/W.W. Norton, Slopopolis: Travels in the New Digital Kingdom, which weaves together deeply reported, character-driven narratives from the AI gold rush. In particular, she is interested in the massive physical infrastructure required for AI, and has spent significant time in rural communities impacted by data center development.
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Her work considers the many consequences of the tech industry’s national building campaign: the local political corruption, the sudden, alarming reversal of climate goals, the systematic destruction of historic farmland, and the dramatic, unexpected enrichment of certain citizens at the expense of their neighbors.
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Preston’s work has appeared in The Believer, The New Yorker, n+1, and the Columbia Journalism Review, and has been anthologized in The Best American Essays 2025. She was the 2025 writer-in-residence at Haystack Labs, a retreat for artists and technologists co-hosted by Haystack Mountain School and the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Bits and Atoms. She received an MFA in Fiction from The University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writing Program, where her work was recognized by the Hopwood Awards. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.