The narrative nonfiction of Jodie Adams Kirshner brings humanity and immediacy to systemic failures by weaving together the stories of affected individuals.  Her previous book, Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises (St. Martin’s, 2019), provides a deeply human account of Detroit’s bankruptcy ordeal through the lives of working-poor Detroiters and an opportunistic outsider.  It won the Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing and was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. 

Jodie is a journalist, lawyer and research professor at the Marron Institute at NYU.  She earned degrees in law and journalism at Harvard and Columbia Universities and studied as a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford University.  After completing her formal education, she taught law at Cambridge University and served as a technical advisor to the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland.

She is using nthspace Torino to complete her next book, After a Generation of Dreams.  It follows low-income racial minority families confronting failures in the US education system and broken promises of economic mobility.  As with Broke, these stories help to uncover new opportunities for reform.

jodieadamskirshner.com