Katherine S. Newman is the author of award winning books on poverty and the working poor, middle class economic insecurity, and school violence.
No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City was awarded the Sidney Hillman Book Prize and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award when it was published in 2000. No Shame in My Game also was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award, as was Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings – her book on the mini-epidemic of mass murders on high school campuses in the 1990s, published by Basic Books.
Katherine’s most recent book is Downhill From Here: Retirement Insecurity in the Age of Inequality, published by Metropolitan Books. After Freedom: The Rise of the Post-Apartheid Generation in Democratic South Africa written in collaboration with Ariane De Lannoy was published by Beacon Press in April 2014, on the 20th anniversary of the end of apartheid in South Africa.
Katherine appears frequently on radio and television to speak on a wide range of subjects related to work and education. She has been a guest on Bill Moyers Journal, CBS Morning News, Nightline, and PBS News Hour as well as the CBC and the BBC. Her opinion articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. And her work has been featured in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Philadelphia Enquirer, among others.
A noted sociologist, she is currently the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs of the University of California. She was previously the Chancellor of Academic Programs & Vice President for Economic Development for the University of Massachusetts system. In 2015, she was honored by the American Sociological Association with their Public Understanding of Sociology Award.
Her forthcoming book, Moving the Needle, written with Elisabeth S. Jacobs, explores the effect of tight labor markets on the working poor.