When the winners of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize were announced this month, there was a familiar name on the list.
Matthew Desmond’s latest book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, has received many prestigious awards, including this year’s Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The book came about as a result of Desmond’s living among the poverty stricken population in Milwaukee while in pursuit of his doctoral degree, and his being witness to the rate of eviction there.
Desmond was granted the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2015, allowing him to delve deeper into the study of the physical as well as psychological consequences eviction has on the working poor in America.
He is a member of the Winslow High School graduating class of 1998. The son of Nick and Shavon Desmond, Matt also attended Arizona State University as an undergraduate and received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Desmond, his wife and two children live in Cambridge, Mass., where he is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.
His other works include On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters (2008), Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America (2009) and The Racial Order (2015), as well as articles published in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and many sociology journals.
According to Desmond, his next project is building a nationwide database of evictions and eviction practices in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of who is affected and the lingering consequences of forcible eviction in American cities.
