Top ten books about being poor in America

Monica Potts is a writer who returned to her hometown in northern Arkansas to work on her new book, The Forgotten Girls.

She is a senior politics reporter for the website FiveThirtyEight. Her previous work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Republic, among other publications, and on NPR. She was a 2015–16 New America Fellow and is a former senior writer with The American Prospect. She lives in Clinton, Arkansas.

At the Guardian Potts tagged ten top books about being poor in America, including:

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

Desmond’s work on families being thrown out in the poor neighbourhoods of Milwaukee was the first glimpse many of us had at all the ways low-income families struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Housing is a basic necessity many families in the US can’t count on today because of a system that gives power to landlords and keeps low-income families trapped in a cycle of eviction. A sociologist, Desmond’s original research was groundbreaking. As a bonus book, his latest, Poverty, by America, also explains the larger forces that immiserate so many in the US.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue