Mayor Dobies Announces Evicted as 2019 Mayor’s Book of the Year
In celebration of National Reading Month in March, Mayor Dobies today continued an annual tradition by naming a city “Book of the Year” to engage the community in a unifying conversation about a relevant issue for the city. For the 2019 Book of the Year, Mayor Dobies chose Matthew Desmond’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize nonfiction winner Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.
“The stories in this book speak to the vast inequalities that exist in our cities,” said Mayor Derek Dobies. “Evicted shows just how hard it can be when you’re poor and up against an entire economic system that’s working against you. It underscores how fundamental fixing our housing market is to rebuilding our city and lifting our people out of poverty. ”
Evicted, set in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, follows eight families struggling to pay rent to their landlords around the 2008 financial crisis. It highlights the issues of extreme poverty, affordable housing, and economic exploitation in the United States.
“Evicted highlights the harsh realities that unfortunately become routine for far too many families — even in cities like Jackson,” said City Councilmember Kelsey Heck. “If you are not able to find stable housing, you can’t focus on other issues that help to build financial stability. Securing safe, affordable and dignified housing must come first.”
“Too often those who lack affordable housing fall victim to homelessness and hunger,” said Laura Stephens, who is the Manager of the Interfaith Shelter and has spent time working with homeless veterans at Community Action Agency. “If we can address housing stability through sound public policy and community action, we can divert homelessness and begin to truly address poverty in our city.”
Dobies said Evicted inspired a lot of the work undertaken in the City of Jackson, including passing policies like the Displaced Tenants Ordinance, laying the groundwork for more than 120 new low-to-moderate income units in the city, and plans laid out in the State of the City to address poverty through focusing on housing first.
Evicted also won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, 2017 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Nonfiction Award, the 2017 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the 2017 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and the 2018 Order of the Coif Book Award.
Last year, Mayor Dobies inaugurated a Mayoral Book of the Year with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, detailing the institutional racism that is disproportionately incarcerating African Americans.
Dobies plans to continue to celebrate National Reading Month by reading to students at Northeast Elementary, Sharp Park Academy, JPS Montessori Center, and St. Mary’s Star of the Sea School.
