Evicted
Presented in partnership with Go Big Read, the Wisconsin Book Festival presents Matthew Desmond for his latest book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. This heartbreaking first-hand account brings together years of fieldwork and data to change the perception of poverty in America.
Following eight families and their respective landlords in Milwaukee, W.I., Desmond calls attention to the city’s growing eviction epidemic. Interweaving stories of poor white families from trailer parks, black families from ghettos and perspectives from landlords, Desmond further explores how poverty, race, and segregation aggregate the escalating eviction rates in Milwaukee.
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Matthew Desmond
Matthew Desmond is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and codirector of the Justice and Poverty Project. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. His primary teaching and research interests include urban sociology, poverty, race and ethnicity, organizations and work, social theory, and ethnography.
Desmond has written essays on educational inequality, dangerous work, political ideology, race and social theory, and the inner-city housing market. Recently, he has published on the prevalence and consequences of eviction and the low-income rental market, network-based survival strategies among the urban poor, and the consequences of new crime control policies on inner-city women in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Demography.
In 2015, Desmond was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” grant.