Katherine Boo

Talk Title: For the Valentine’s Day Skeptics Among Us, An Evening of Social Change

Wednesday, February 14, 2018, 5:00 pm, Stackhouse Theater

Over 25 years as a journalist, Katherine Boo has established herself as a fearless, honest writer dedicated to telling the stories of the poor and disadvantaged on the pages of our most esteemed publications. A contributing writer for The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post, she learned to report at the alternative weekly Washington City Paper, after which she worked as a writer and co-editor of Washington Monthly magazine. Over the years, her reporting from disadvantaged communities in the United States and abroad has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Genius Grant, and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing.

Boo continues her quest to give voice to those without one in her New York Times bestselling book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize, and adapted for the stage by the National Theatre. A landmark work of narrative nonfiction, it tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the world’s great unequal cities: Mumbai. In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, Boo illuminates a bewildering age of global change and inequality.

Boo is currently working on her next book, an exploration of social mobility in the neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C.

Ms. Boo’s visit is co-sponsored by the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications.