CALS Speaker Series presents Brian Goldstone

J. N. Heiskell Distinguished Lecture

Pulitzer Prize winning author Brian Goldstone will discuss his book There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. Moderated by Ben Goodwin, Executive Director of Our House. A book signing will follow the session.

Books will be available for purchase on site, sold by WordsWorth Books.

About Brian Goldstone

Brian Goldstone is a journalist, anthropologist, and author of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. Told through the lives of five families in Atlanta, the book traces the rise of America’s “working homeless,” exposing the forces—gentrification, racialized displacement, precarious low-wage labor—fueling a deepening crisis of housing insecurity. The book won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was also 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.

Brian is currently Writer in Residence at Duke University and a fellow with the Watchdog Writers Group. He holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Duke. In 2021, he was a National Fellow at New America; prior to this, he was a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Luce Foundation, Fulbright, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2015-2016, as a Justice-in-Education Fellow at Columbia, he taught at Sing Sing prison. 

About There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.

In this gripping and deeply reported book, 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.

Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are the nation’s hidden homeless—omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive problem.

By turns heartbreaking and urgent, There Is No Place for Us illuminates the true magnitude, causes, and consequences of the new American homelessness—and shows that it won’t be solved until housing is treated as a fundamental human right.

“There Is No Place for Us is an exceptional feat of reporting, full of an immediacy that calls to mind Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted... This is a moving book. It is also appropriately enraging.” (New York Times)

“An incredible feat... Stunning... A book like this ought to be a rallying cry, the 21st-century equivalent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.” (The Nation)