Join acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond for a discussion of his groundbreaking book, “Poverty, by America,” a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Nonfiction. In this landmark work, Desmond weaves together history, research and original reporting to reveal how affluent Americans, both consciously and unconsciously, perpetuate poverty. With compassion and urgency, he challenges us to rethink our approach to this pressing moral issue and to envision bold solutions. Desmond presents a compelling and ambitious case for eradicating poverty, urging us all to become poverty abolitionists, united in a politics of collective belonging and striving for a future of shared prosperity and true freedom. 

Speaker 

Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and the founding director and principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, which published the first-ever national dataset of evictions in America and remains a leading source of information on housing insecurity. Desmond is the author of five books, including “Poverty, by America” (2023) and “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” (2016). Praised by The New Yorker as “urgent and accessible” and by Esquire as “another paradigm-shifting inquiry into America’s dark heart,” “Poverty, By America” draws on history, research and original reporting to make a new and bracing argument about why poverty persists in America — and how we can abolish it. Desmond is also a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune. A past MacArthur Fellow, his primary teaching and research interests include urban sociology, poverty, race and ethnicity, organizations and work, social theory and ethnography. 

Moderator 

Steve Marcus ’10 is an attorney in the Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation group at Skadden and Arps. He began his legal career as a public defender at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and as a law clerk at all three levels of the federal judiciary, most recently as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor ’76. He is the immediate past chair of the Princeton Prize in Race Relations. Marcus received his A.B. from Princeton University, majoring in the School of Public and International Affairs, and his J.D. from New York University School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Kern public interest scholar.

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