Matthew Desmond’s depiction of eight families struggling with high poverty and housing insecurity around the 2008 financial crisis won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

On Wednesday, Feb. 28, Desmond will be at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School to discuss his prize-winning book, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.” The talk will be held at 4:30 p.m. in Princeton University’s Robertson Hall and will be followed by a book sale and signing. 

A New York Times best-seller, “Evicted” follows eight families in the poorest areas of Milwaukee as they struggle to pay their rent — telling poignant personal stories ranging from a woman who is evicted because her boyfriend abuses her, to a landlord who refuses to fix stopped-up pipes. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, “Evicted” was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. President Obama named it to his personal list of favorite books of 2017.

As a professor of sociology at Princeton University and the principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond researches poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy and racial inequality. He is the recipient of the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award, and the 2015 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award. In 2016 he was named one of the POLITICO 50 – the “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.” He is also a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.