Journalist and educator Linda Villarosa will present her book, Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation (Doubleday/Penguin Random House, 2022), on October 18 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100. An award-winning writer at the New York Times Magazine, Villarosa writes about the intersection of health, medicine, and race. In Under the Skin, Villarosa tells the story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the forces in the U.S. health care system and in American society that cause Black people to “live sicker and die quicker” compared to their white counterparts. Under the Skin was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, Publisher’s Weekly and NPR, and one of the 10 Best Books of 2022 by the New York Times. It was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize and won the 2023 J. Anthony Lukas Prize for excellence in nonfiction writing from the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the Lillian Smith Book Award from the University of Georgia. It was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism by the New York Public Library. A graduate of the University of Colorado, Villarosa spent a year at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as a journalism fellow. She also holds a master’s degree in urban journalism/digital storytelling from CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where she is now a professor and journalist-in-residence. Villarosa’s appearance is co-sponsored by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series and the Lowell Humanities Series.