Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min<\/p>\n
Author Emma Copley Eisenberg; her mom, Claire Copley; and her partner, Art Phung, let out a gleeful exhale Monday morning as billboard installers sent a swath of oceanic blue heavy duty vinyl fluttering down a sky-high placard rooted at Northern Liberties<\/a>\u2019 Front Street and Fairmount<\/a> Avenue.<\/p>\n As the workers tightly wrapped the vinyl around the billboard\u2019s base, the image of a fat naked woman came into focus. Her skin spilled over a fully exposed bottom in thick rolls, a piece of fabric loosely draped over her protruding belly. <\/p>\n \u201cYour gut is a terrible thing to lose,\u201d is printed across the billboard in bold caps. In the lower right hand corner is Eisenberg\u2019s website: FatSwim.com<\/a>, named for her forthcoming third book of the same name<\/a>. It is a collection of short stories centering Philadelphia-area fat people, many of whom are queer. <\/p>\n \u201cWe just so rarely see images of fat people in public,\u201d said Eisenberg whose fiction and nonfiction pieces aggressively challenge the notion that big people are unhappy in their skin and view their girth as temporary.<\/p>\n Eisenberg prefers to use the term \u201cfat.\u201d Plus-size, curvy, and overweight, she says are euphemisms that imply being large is inherently bad. <\/p>\n The your fat body is just fine message needs to be amplified particularly in today\u2019s world, Eisenberg said, where GLP-1 usage is widespread throughout contemporary pop culture, their advertisements infiltrating daily mundane tasks from watching television to scrolling. <\/p>\n \u201cThere is wisdom in the body,\u201d Eisenberg said. \u201cThere are emotional and spiritual consequences when we view our whole selves as disgusting. We live in a world where people are always telling us to trust our gut. But there is so much pressure to lose it.\u201d <\/p>\n On the strength of fat liberation alone, the 44-foot-high, 12-feet-tall, and 28-feet wide matte billboard situated on I-95<\/a> North just before the Girard Avenue exit, sends a powerful message. <\/p>\n But that\u2019s only half it. <\/p>\n Last September, Eisenberg was one of 500,000 authors awarded $3,000 in a landmark settlement against Anthropic,<\/a> an AI research company. A judge ruled the San Francisco-based tech company illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books to train its large language models. <\/p>\n Eisenberg\u2019s 2020 nonfiction work The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia<\/a> was one of those books. The $1.5 billion settlement was the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright cases. <\/p>\n \u201cIt felt like such a violation,\u201d Eisenberg said. \u201cOur original art was being stolen and recycled to create slop.\u201d <\/p>\n From that settlement, Eisenberg paid Baton Rouge, La.-based Lamar Advertising<\/a> $1,500 to rent the billboard for six weeks. Fat Swim is Eisenberg\u2019s giant middle finger to AI, algorithms, and any technology that controls how artists get their work into the world. She\u2019s hoping potential readers will find her website by happenstance, not a newsfeed that may \u2014 or may not \u2014 have targeted them. <\/p>\n \u201cEssentially, algorithms are controlled by multinational corporations that are profiting off our data,\u201d Eisenberg said. \u201cI want to interrupt that and, as a human, put important ideas in front of other humans who might not otherwise find them.\u201d <\/p>\n A billboard, she thought, is an analog broadcast that is the exact opposite of a newsfeed. <\/p>\n Eisenberg points to artists like Joseph Kosuth<\/a> who, in the early 1970s, erected billboards throughout Europe and the Americas that blurred the line between public art and advertising. She was also inspired by feminist artists Jenny Holzer<\/a> and Felix Gonzalez-Torres<\/a>, whose texts and photographs, respectively, shouted messages of equality to passersby in the 1980s and 1990s in major metropolitan American cities. <\/p>\n But, Eisenberg said, fellow South Philadelphian Zoe Strauss<\/a> is her greatest influence. In 2012, the street photographer\u2019s work appeared on 54 billboards and was the subject of a Philadelphia Museum of Art<\/a> exhibit. <\/p>\n Even authors like Eisenberg who snag book deals at major publishing houses are largely responsible for book sales and marketing. Fat Swim will be released on April 28, by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House. A March Publisher\u2019s Weekly article reported that in 2025, more than four million book titles were published<\/a>. Bold marketing ideas like billboards can potentially cut through the cyber noise and reach the reader directly. <\/p>\n According to Lamar Advertising, Eisenberg\u2019s billboard is seen by 450,000 people a week, or 1.8 million people a month. <\/p>\n \u201cThe landscape for books in 2026 is very challenging because publishers believe that volume is key to sales,\u201d Eisenberg said. \u201cThis is one small way I hope my book can be discovered.\u201d <\/p>\n Eisenberg \u2014 a 2025 Pew Fellow<\/a> \u2014 licensed the billboard photograph from Downington Artist Devon Dadoly. <\/a>The two met at Philadelphia\u2019s Fat Con<\/a> last year and Eisenberg said she fell in love with Dadoly\u2019s sensual depiction of fat people, right down to their \u201cdelicious folds.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cWhat she\u2019s doing is incredibly radical,\u201d Dadoly said. \u201cAs someone who is a fat person and who proudly identifies that way, I want to be seen. I don\u2019t hate my body. I\u2019m not a means to an end. I\u2019m not some \u2018Before\u2019 image.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFat Swim\u201d the short story from which the book takes is title is about a chubby pre-adolescent girl who is trying to come to terms with her size and experiences complex feelings watching a Fat Positive Pool Party in West Philly. <\/p>\n Phung, Eisenberg\u2019s partner who is a graphic designer, edited the picture to make it look like an ocean. The wavy water graphics give the photo the mysterious vibe of a fashion magazine. <\/p>\n \u201cWe went with water because \u2018Fat Swim\u2019 is a story about water and there are many stories in the book that have a water theme,\u201d Phung said. \u201cWe really wanted to show the joy of what its like existing in all kinds of bodies.\u201d <\/p>\n When Fat Swim drops, Eisenberg will have a book party and go on a small book tour that includes an April 30 appearance at the Ethical Society sponsored by The Head and The Hand Book Store<\/a>.<\/p>\n