A sociologist and co-director of the Justice and Poverty Project at Harvard, Matthew Desmond won a 2015 MacArthur fellowship for his groundbreaking research into the root causes and far-reaching effects of American poverty. He is the author of the award-winning book On the Fireline, a riveting account of firemen of the U.S. Forest Service tackling wildland fires; the editor of a collection of scholarly studies about deprivation; and co-author of two books on race. In the “exhaustively researched, vividly realized and, above all, unignorable” (New York Times) Evicted, he journeys to Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods to tell the harrowing stories of eight families on the brink and the system of economic exploitation that has created this uniquely American problem.