The Interactive Resource Center, First Lutheran Church, and PEN America are hosting THERE IS NO PLACE FOR US – a conversation with journalist Brian Goldstone- the evening of April 8th. Brian’s forthcoming book There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (Crown, March 2025) humanizes the experiences of those with jobs who are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy, but a thriving one.
Goldstone engages narrative reporting, showcasing five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed through gentrification, low wages, and lack of tenants’ rights.
Part of the discussion will also engage issues impacting the local community.
A reception to follow.
Goldstone’s reporting and essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, Guernica, and Jacobin, among other publications. He has written about psychiatric care in Ghana, life after incarceration, the plight of chronic pain sufferers during an opioid epidemic, Israel’s secretive campaign to deport African asylum seekers, and most recently, homelessness and housing precarity.
The discussion is moderated by writer Deonna Kelli Sayed, the Development and Communications Director at the North Carolina for Community and Justice (NCCJ), an IRC board member, and the PEN America NC Piedmont Chapter Leader. The event will be open to the public and free of charge. Scuppernong Books will be on-site as the official bookseller.
The Interactive Resource Center is a day center in Greensboro, North Carolina, for those experiencing homelessness and has served the community since 2009.
Brian Goldstone is a journalist 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. It will be published by Crown in March 2025.
His longform reporting and essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, Guernica, and Jacobin, among other publications. He has written about psychiatric care in Ghana, life after incarceration, the plight of chronic pain sufferers during an opioid epidemic, Israel’s secretive campaign to deport African asylum seekers, and, most recently, homelessness and housing precarity. He is editor of African Futures: Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility. In 2019, he co-organized the symposium “Uncertain States: Narrative Journalism and Its Limits” at the Columbia School of Journalism.
Brian received his PhD in anthropology from Duke University. In 2017-2018, he was a Luce/ACLS Fellow in Journalism, Religion & International Affairs; 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 New America, 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.