RSF Trustee Kathryn Edin Wins 2016 Hillman Prize
RSF trustee Kathryn Edin (Johns Hopkins University) has been awarded the 2016 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism with co-author H. Luke Shaefer (University of Michigan) for their book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. In the book, Edin and Shaefer investigate the rise of households surviving on virtually no cash income and find that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to one and a half million American households, including about three million children. Through in-depth interviews with struggling families, the authors discover 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.
Edin and Shaefer discussed some of their findings in a recent article for the RSF Journal special issue, “Severe Deprivation in America,” which is available in full here. Edin is also co-author, with Stefanie DeLuca and Susan Clampet-Lundquist, of the new RSF book Coming of Age in the Other America; co-author of Making Ends Meet; and co-editor of Unmarried Couples with Children.
Since 1950, the Sidney Hillman Foundation has honored journalists who pursue investigative reporting and deep storytelling in service of the common good. Click here to read more about the Hillman Prizes.