Ten Evenings

Matthew Desmond

“This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy.”

Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted, sociologist Matthew Desmond, urges his readers to move away from thinking about poverty as systemic, and instead recognize personal agency and individual privileges that perpetuate this abysmal cycle, in Poverty, by America.

This landmark book draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.

Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. He is the author of four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.

“Urgent and accessible… It’s refreshing to read a work of social criticism that eschews the easy and often smug allure of abstraction, in favor of plainspoken practicality. Poverty, by America deserves to be one of those books you see people reading on the subway, or handing around at organizing meetings, or citing in congressional hearings. Its moral force is a gut punch.”

THE NEW YORKER

Books

Copies of Poverty, By America , along with other titles by Matthew Desmond, are available from White Whale Bookstore.

WHEN

Monday, October 2, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. ET

IN-PERSON TICKETS

Due to subscriber returns, in-person tickets to Ten Evenings may become available on a rolling basis.
If you’d like to purchase an in-person ticket or exchange your online ticket, please call our Box Office at 412.622.8866 during our hours of 10:00am – 4:00pm Monday -Thursday.

ONLINE TICKETS

Online tickets are $18
ONLINE INDIVIDUAL TICKETSONLINE SUBSCRIPTION
Online ticket holders will be emailed a link to view the livestream on the day of the event. All ticket holders will have access to the recorded program for one week, expiring after October 9, 2023.

WHERE

Carnegie Library Lecture Hall
4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, 15213

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