Brian Goldstone

Brian Goldstone is a journalist and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book 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. The book was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2025 by The New York Times and The Atlantic, and selected as one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year.

His longform reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, 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 2021, he was a Fellow at New America; 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 the Luce Foundation, 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.

Selected Work

• The New American Homeless: The genesis for Goldstone’s book, this is the story of a working family’s futile struggle to remain housed in Atlanta—and how the city’s “revitalization,” as in many other urban centers, is coming at the expense of its low-income residents.
• 3 kids. 2 paychecks. No home.: A portrait of homelessness in Salinas, a fertile corner of California that feeds much of the country.
• A Prayer’s Chance: A story about schizophrenia, stigma, and the perilous state of mental health care in West Africa.
• The Pain Refugees: An investigation into the collateral damage of the nation’s war on opioids: chronic pain sufferers who are being cut off from their medication.