Bio

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist. His work has appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York magazine, the American Prospect, Salon, Slate,  the New Yorker online, the Los Angeles Weekly, The Village Voice, the Daily Beast, and Rolling Stone. Originally from England and a graduate of Oxford University, he has since adopted his mother’s homeland of America and now lives in Sacramento, CA with his wife, daughter and son. He has a master’s degree from Columbia University School of Journalism. In 2000 he was awarded an Open Society, Crime, and Communities Media Fellowship, and he is currently a Senior Fellow at the New York City-based Demos think tank. His latest book, a memoir, is titled The House of Twenty Thousand Books. The American Way of Poverty, came out in September 2013, and was listed by the New York Times as amongst the 100 Notable Books of the Year. Prior to that, Inside Obama’s Brain, was published in December 2009. Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix was published in June, 2009, by PoliPoint Press. American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment, was published by Beacon Press in the spring of 2007. His first book, Hard Time Blues, was published in 2002; his second book, Conned, was published in 2006.

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives, published by Nation Books in September 2013, is an ambitious portrait of poverty in 21st century America. Many of the interviews on which this book is based are accessible on the audio archive: www.thevoicesofpoverty.org.

Abramsky is also working on a family memoir, to be published in the UK in 2014.

Sasha at a book signing