School hosts discussion with Matthew Desmond

The School of Nursing is hosting Matthew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, to discuss one of the most-anticipated books of 2023, Poverty, By America. In Desmond’s newest book he reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. The event will be on April 5 at 4-6 p.m. at Northrop.

Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology and launched The Eviction Lab at Princeton University after conversations with renters and policymakers convinced him that collecting national data on eviction would help answer fundamental questions about residential instability, forced moves and poverty in America. In 2018, The Eviction Lab published the first-ever national dataset of evictions in America, collecting millions of data points going back to 2000, and it has gone on to serve as a resource hub for the millions of American renters who faced increased housing insecurity due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Desmond is a New York Times Magazine contributing writer, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and The Chicago Tribune.

Copies of Poverty, By America will be sold at the event and can be pre-ordered through the University of Minnesota Bookstores.