Matthew Desmond, a Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, will give a talk on his latest bestseller, Poverty, by America (Crown/Penguin Random House, 2023). Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor by exploiting the poor and driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He challenges Americans to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and true freedom. Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University whose acclaimed book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City transformed the understanding of inequity and economic exploitation in America. It won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, Carnegie Medal, and PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. Desmond’s talk will take place on October 11 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100. The event is presented by the Lowell Humanities Series and co-sponsored by the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics, PULSE Program for Service Learning, and Sociology Department.