Matthew Desmond Biography  

Matthew Desmond grew up in Winslow, Arizona, the son of a nondenominational pastor and a hardworking mother who tried to make do on a tight budget. He attended Arizona State University, in Tempe, Arizona, and while there his childhood home was repossessed by the bank. He also began to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, an organization that builds affordable homes, and to interact with unhoused residents of Tempe. After graduating in 2002, Desmond attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning an MS in 2004 and a PhD in 2010. As part of his PhD work, he moved into a trailer park owned by Tobin Charney, one of the figures in the book resulting from his work: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award (2016), the Pulitzer Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction (2017), and several other prestigious awards. 

Previous to Evicted, he had published On the Fireline (2007),was a coauthor of Race in America and The Racial Order (both 2015), and hadreceived a MacArthur Genius grant in 2015 for his work. He was a Junior Fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows and an associate professor of the social sciences and Harvard University. He is a professor of sociology at Princeton University, where he is the principal investigator at the Eviction Lab, which creates data to further understanding of the housing crisis and to help policy makers address it.