EAST LANSING, Mich. — The City of East Lansing and Michigan State University have announced the book selection for the 2019 One Book, One Community (OBOC) program: “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” by author Matthew Desmond.
Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book transports readers to the poorest neighborhoods in Milwaukee to tell the heartbreaking, real-life stories of eight families struggling to keep a roof over their heads. By living among these families in 2008 and 2009, Desmond is able to provide readers with a ground-level view of one of 21st-century America’s most devastating problems and shine a probing light on the human cost of America’s immense inequality.
Desmond’s book has garnered countless accolades, including being the winner of: the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction. The book was also a New York Times bestseller and was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker and many more.
Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. As the principal investigator at The Eviction Lab at Princeton University, Desmond’s research has focused on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality and ethnography.
Desmond’s book, “Evicted,” was picked by the East Lansing-MSU community via an online survey that was conducted in early 2019. The survey invited community participants to select one of three books on the OBOC Selection Committee’s short list for the 2019 program, with Desmond’s “Evicted” garnering the most votes. More information on the book can be found at http://evictedbook.com/.
About OBOC Signature Events
As part of the 2019 OBOC program, Desmond will visit the East Lansing-MSU community in August 2019. Community members are invited to A Community Conversation with Matthew Desmond on Sunday, Aug. 25 at 6:30 p.m. at the East Lansing Hannah Community Center, 819 Abbot Road. Desmond will also speak during the MSU Fall Convocation at the Jack Breslin Student Events Center, 534 Birch Road, on Monday Aug. 26 at 9 a.m. Both events are FREE and open to all community members.
The One Book, One Community program encourages the East Lansing-Michigan State University community to read the same book and come together to explore its themes and issues at a variety of campus and community events each fall. The selected book is widely read on and off campus. The highlight of the program is the visit by the author(s) to the community in the fall. OBOC is one of the first community reading programs to bring together the students of a major university and the residents of its surrounding community. Learn more about OBOC and the 2019 program at www.onebookeastlansing.com.