Matthew Desmond

Matthew Desmond is an American sociologist. He is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015 and a Harvey Fellowship in 2006. Desmond won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for his work about poverty Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.

Desmond studied as an undergraduate at Arizona State University, serving at the same time as a volunteer with Habitat for Humanity in Tempe. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted was the subject of a WBUR Radio Boston interview. Authors of the radio website article, Caitlin O'Keefe and Meghna Chakrabarti, quoted the Pulitzer committee's response to the book, "A deeply researched exposé that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty."

•  
• Emirbayer, Mustafa and Matthew Desmond (2009). Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 9780072970517
•  
• Desmond, Matthew (2016). Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Crown/Archetype, 2016. ISBN 9780553447446