Congratulations to Family Action Network (FAN) on their 40th anniversary season!
We are pleased to collaborate with FAN as they welcome Matthew Desmond, Ph.D. author of the new book, Poverty, by America. Prof. Desmond will be interviewed by Alex Kotlowitz. This in-person event is free and open to the public. No registration required.
This event will be recorded but not livestreamed. First 400 attendees will receive a free copy of Poverty, by America, one per household. Additional book sale and signing at the event.
About the Book: The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages? In his new landmark book Poverty, by America, acclaimed social scientist and urban ethnographer Matthew Desmond, Ph.D. draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.
About the Author: Matthew Desmond, Ph.D. is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and the founding director of the Eviction Lab. His last book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, among others. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Prof. Desmond is also a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.
About the Interviewer: Alex Kotlowitz is the author of four books, including his most recent, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago, which received the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Kotlowitz’s first book, the national bestseller There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America, was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. He a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
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The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a “provocative and compelling” (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.
“Urgent and accessible . . . Its moral force is a gut punch.”—The New Yorker
