Katherine Boo | Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Katherine Boo, 2013 Library Lion and author of the National Book Award-winning Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, MacArthur Award-winning author of Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, discuss poverty around the world.

Katherine Boo is the author of the National Book Award winner for Nonfiction and 2013 Pulitzer finalist, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003, focusing on issues of poverty, opportunity, social and economic policy, and education. Before joining The New Yorker, Katherine was a writer and editor at the Washington Post, working on the Outlook and Investigative staffs. She was also an editor and writer for the Washington City Paper and The Washington Monthly. Among the prizes she’s received for her writing about disadvantaged populations are a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and a MacArthur “Genius” Award. Katherine Boo is the recepient of The New York Public Library's 2013 Bernstein Award for Journalism.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is a journalist and the author of Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx (Scribner, 2003). The result of a decade spent closely involved in the lives of her subjects, this book, a New York Times bestseller, won many awards including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Ron Ridenhour Prize, Borders New Voices, and was chosen by over twenty publications as one of the top ten books of that year. It was also a finalist for the National Critics Book Circle Award for Nonfiction and the international Lettres Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage.

LeBlanc was a 2009 Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, a 2007 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and in 2006, the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She is a currently a visiting Scholar at the New York University School of Journalism, completing a book about standup comedians.

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