Matthew Desmond, author portrait
© Barron Bixler

Matthew Desmond

Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University. 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. He is the author of four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond’s research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”
Poverty, by America
Evicted

Matthew Desmond on How to End Poverty, and His Book POVERTY, BY AMERICA | Inside the Book

How housing is ignored in the poverty discussion | Author Matthew Desmond

Matthew Desmond (author of Evicted) | What I'm Reading

EVICTED by Matthew Desmond | Book Trailer

Books

Poverty, by America
Evicted

Media

Matthew Desmond on How to End Poverty, and His Book POVERTY, BY AMERICA | Inside the Book

How housing is ignored in the poverty discussion | Author Matthew Desmond

Matthew Desmond (author of Evicted) | What I'm Reading

EVICTED by Matthew Desmond | Book Trailer

Register for the 2025 Penguin Random House First-Year Experience® Conference Author Events!

Penguin Random House Author Events at the 44th Annual First-Year Experience® Conference February 16-19, 2025 New Orleans, Louisiana Hyatt Regency New Orleans Click Here to RSVP A complimentary meal and a limited number of books will be available to attendees. Each event will also be followed by an author signing. Interested in hosting one of these

Read more

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2024-25

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2024-25 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 336 programs and their title selections, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2024-25. We will continue to update this listing to provide the

Read more

2025 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2025! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about science, technology, history, student success, the environment, public health, and current events, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through the pages,

Read more

FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a “provocative and compelling” (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. Access educator resources for the book at: endpovertyusa.org/#teaching-resources   Chapter 1 The Kind of Problem Poverty Is I

Read more