In a gripping and deeply reported book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, Brian Goldstone, plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start in the country’s “Black Mecca” after being priced out of DC. Kara dreams of starting her own cleaning business while mopping floors at a public hospital. Britt scores a coveted housing voucher. Michelle is in school to become a social worker. Celeste toils at her warehouse job while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children—and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation’s working homeless.
Goldstone is a journalist and author whose longform reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic, among other publications. There Is No Place for Us was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2025 by The New York Times and The Atlantic, and selected as one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. He has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Duke University and was a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University. In 2021, he was a National Fellow at New America.
Cost: Free
Julie Deardorff
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