Washtenaw Reads 2017 Author Event: Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer, Authors of "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America"

Tue, 03/28/2017 - 3:10pm

When: February 7, 2017 at Rackham Auditorium 915 E. Washington St. Ann Arbor

Hundreds of community members throughout Washtenaw County read and discussed the award-winning book $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer, which was selected as the Washtenaw Reads in September 2016 by a panel of community judges. About the book: After two decades of groundbreaking research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen before — households surviving on virtually no income, a level of destitution so deep as to be unthought-of in the world’s most advanced capitalist economy. Edin teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on surveys of the incomes of the poor, to discover that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to 1.5 million American households, including about 3 million children. The result of their investigative teamwork is this book, which received much critical acclaim. "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America" won the prestigious Hillman Prize for Book Journalism by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, was short-listed for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation and was named a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. About the authors: Kathryn J. Edin, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, is the coauthor of "Promises I Can’t Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage" and "Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work." H. Luke Shaefer, Ph.D. is an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work and Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, where he studies poverty and social welfare policy in the United States.. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, and received the 2013 Early Career Achievement Award, given by the Society for Social Work and Research.