Adult List

Desmond, Matthew.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, 2016.

In Evicted, Harvard sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond
follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their
heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling”
(New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of povertyand economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of 21st-century America’s most devastating problems.

Liebow, Elliot. Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women, 1995.

Through this searing study of women in homeless shelters, Elliott Leibow
disabuses us of the myth that the homeless are generally lazy and disinterested
in altering their condition. Tell Them Who I Am places the reader squarely in the
shoes of the inhabitants of a Washington, D.C. homeless shelter for women.
Walking the reader through a day in the life of a homeless person, hour by
hour, Liebow presents the obstacles placed in front of women who ache to
regain the dignity they once possessed.

Edin, Kathryn & Shaefer, Luke. $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in
America, 2016.

After two decades of brilliant research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed
something she hadn’t seen since the mid-1990s — households surviving on
virtually no income. The authors illuminate a troubling trend: a low-wage labor
market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but
hidden landscape of survival strategies among America’s extreme poor. More than
a powerful exposé, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our
national debate on income inequality.

Kennedy, Michelle. Without a Net: Middle Class and Homeless (with Kids) in
America, 2005.

At age 24, Michelle was suddenly single, homeless and living out of a car with
her three small children. She waitressed night shifts while her kids slept out in
the diner’s parking lot. She saved her tips in the glove compartment, and set
aside a few quarters every week for truck stop showers for her and the kids.
With startling humor and honesty, Kennedy describes the frustrations of never
having enough money for a security deposit on an apartment but having too
much to qualify for public assistance.

Street Sense. Street Verses: Poems by the Homeless Writers and
Vendors of Street Sense, 2007.

The poems inside this book come from the pages of Street Sense over the
course of its first three years of operation. Homeless and formerly homeless
men and women, many of whom also sell the paper, wrote all of these
pieces. While some are directly about homelessness, many describe love,
work, friendship, sorrow and pain. These poems reflect their deepest
thoughts, creative dreams, complicated pasts and immediate needs.

Children’s List

Mommy, Are We Homeless? Winston-Salem: PSG Printing Services of
Greensboro, Inc., 2003.

This is a story about a young girl whose entire life changes when she
becomes homeless. She still goes to the same school, but she now lives
in a shelter. She is unaware of the other children like her, until she meets
a girl on the school bus one day. They talk and Molly discovers that she
is not unique and she makes new friends.

Johnson, Jerrilyn J. Mommy, Are We Homeless? Winston-Salem: PSG
Printing Services of Greensboro, Inc., 2003.

This is a story about a young girl whose entire life changes when she
becomes homeless. She still goes to the same school, but she now lives in
a shelter. She is unaware of the other children like her, until she meets a girl
on the school bus one day. They talk and Molly discovers that she is not
unique and she makes new friends but also keeps her old ones.but also
keeps her old ones.