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FEATURED BOOKS
Poverty, by America, by Matt Desmond
Poverty, by America shows how poverty isn’t just something that happens in America—it’s something we make happen. The people in charge have built a system that keeps millions of our neighbors hungry, unhoused, and sick, even though we live in the richest country on earth. But Desmond doesn’t just point fingers. He invites every one of us to become a different kind of person—a poverty abolitionist. That means seeing how we are all connected and lifting each other up as we work for change.
There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, by Brian Goldstone
There Is No Place for Us follows five Atlanta families as they are pushed into homelessness despite working full-time and doing everything they can to stay afloat. Through their stories, Goldstone documents a growing national crisis: the rise of homelessness among working people as wages fail to keep pace with rapidly rising rents and survival becomes increasingly impossible for working-class families
MODERATOR
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Dr. Carmen Rojas is the president and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation. Under her leadership, which started in 2020, MCF launched the prestigious Freedom Scholar award and has granted more than $323 million in funding to dozens of organizations doing the hard work of shifting power to those people who have long been excluded from having it. Prior to MCF, Dr. Rojas was the cofounder and CEO of the Workers Lab, an innovation lab that partners with workers to develop new ideas that help them succeed and flourish.
PANELISTS
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Tara Raghuveer is the director of the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), a national union of unions organizing tenants to wield power at a massive scale, to bargain for tenant protections, to disrupt the flow of capital to those who commodify our homes, to secure alternatives to the current housing market, to guarantee housing as a public good, and to establish tenants as a political and economic class that cannot be ignored. Tara is also the founding director of KC Tenants, the 10,000+ member citywide tenant union in Kansas City, Missouri, responsible for the city's Tenants Bill of Rights (2019), Right to Counsel (2021), Source of Income Discrimination Ban (2024), and an Office of Language Access (2024).
After receiving his PhD in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Desmond joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. He is the author of multiple books, including Poverty, by America (2023) and Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. 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.”
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Brian Goldstone is a journalist and author of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, a finalist for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. It was also named one of the ten best books of 2025 by The New York Times and The Atlantic. His longform reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, and The California Sunday Magazine, among other publications. He received his PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University and was a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University. In 2021, he was a National Fellow at New America. He lives in Atlanta with his family.
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