Guest Speaker

Journalist, historian, and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen books. In 2001, Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America became a New York Times bestseller, and has since sold over one million copies. Nickel and Dimed, a trenchant examination of working-class poverty that chronicles Ehrenreich's own attempt to live on minimum wage, is now required reading at more than 600 colleges and universities, from University of the Ozarks to Yale University to Western Wyoming Community College. In 2005, Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch, also a New York Times bestseller, exposed the ever more prevalent phenomenon of white-collar unemployment.

A frequent contributor to Harper's and The Nation, Ehrenreich has been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine. In 2004, she received the Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Prize for Creative Citizenship, given annually to an American who challenges the status quo "through distinctive, courageous, imaginative, socially responsible work of significance." Ehrenreich's latest book THIS LAND IS YOURTHEIR LAND, a collection of her published columns, was published by Metropolitan Books in July 2008. Ehrenreich lives near Washington, DC.