SMU students are reading Evicted as part of an academic initiative that includes small-group discussions about the book before and after classes begin in the fall.
Author Desmond, professor of sociology at Princeton University, knows firsthand the trauma of eviction. A bank foreclosed on his family's Arizona home while he was attending college on scholarship. Since then, he has devoted his research to the intersection of poverty, race and gender in American life.
To write Evicted, Desmond focused on the plight of renters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city where 29 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. In the book, he examines eight households, both of renters and landlords, to better understand why one in eight Milwaukee renters experience eviction, and nationally 2.8 million Americans fear losing their homes.
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, the book has received the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2017 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award and The New York Times Ten Best Books of 2016. It also was a finalist for the 2016 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.
SMU Reads 2017 partners include Authors Live, Barnes & Noble, Coaching for Literacy, Dallas Festival of Ideas, Dallas Area Habitat for Humanity, Dallas Mayor's Task Force on Poverty, Dallas Public Library, Friends of the Dallas Public Library, Friends of the SMU Libraries, Highland Park Library, Reading for a Reason, Serve West Dallas, SMU Cary Maguire Center for Ethics & Public Responsibility, Well Read Women of Dallas and Year of Unity