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What is the first step to effectively fight poverty? Understanding its causes. Journalist Matthew Desmond is leading the way in detailing how our housing system, and other societal structures, makes economic survival impossible for millions of people.
Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City quickly made Desmond one of America’s most important thinkers and activists. Desmond’s ethnographic work with families struggling to pay rent and the abusive landlords taking advantage of them during the 2008 financial crisis created an accessible exposé of the ways our economic system punishes poverty. His next book, Poverty, By America, broadens the scope of his research, demonstrating how wealthy Americans keep poor people poor. A professor at Princeton University, Desmond presents his masterful research and analysis with compassion and moral urgency, as he asks us to help end poverty and bring the American collective closer to freedom and equality.
Bernice Yeung, managing editor of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program, has been published in numerous media outlets, including The New York Times and NPR, and was nominated for an Emmy for her work investigating the sexual violence against blue collar workers. Her first book, In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.
Photo by Barron Bixler