RSF authors Bruce Western (Harvard University), Monica Prasad (Northwestern University), and Janelle Wong (University of Maryland) have received awards for their recent books.

Western’s RSF book Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison (2018) has won the Outstanding Book Award from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the American Sociological Association. Homeward, an in-depth look at the lives of over one hundred men and women released from the Massachusetts state prison system, was widely reviewed and cited in the press. Bruce Western has received RSF grant support for his groundbreaking research on mass incarceration and social and economic inequality. He is also the author of the RSF book Punishment and Inequality in America (2006), and co-editor, with David Grusky and Christopher Wimer, of The Great Recession (2011).  

Prasad won the Viviana Zelizer Best Book Award from the Economic Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association for her RSF book Starving the Beast: Ronald Reagan and the Tax Cut Revolution (2018). Starving the Beast uncovers the origins of the GOP’s relentless focus on tax cuts and shows how this is a uniquely American phenomenon. Prasad was a visiting scholar at the Foundation during the 2015-2016 academic year. 

The Western Political Science Association’s Committee on the Status of Asian Pacific Americans selected Wong’s Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change (2018) for the 2019 Don T. Nakanishi Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Service. Wong’s book has been cited in the press for its contributions on why demographic change has not contributed to a political realignment.