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Eli Sanders is the associate editor of Seattle's weekly newspaper The Stranger. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2012 for his reporting on the murder of Teresa Butz. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The American Prospect, and Salon, among other publications. Sanders lives in Seattle.
Eli Sanders's website
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What made you decide to cover this story for The Stranger?
I was a news and features writer for The Stranger in 2009 when the crime at the center of this book occurred. An editor there read a short account of the crime and soon I was on my way to the neighborhood where it happened. Honestly, I did not want to go. I had been a journalist in Seattle for ten years at that point and was feeling at my limit in terms of covering tragedies.
There were only sketchy details about what had transpired, who had been killed, and who had survived. I wrote a story that was set in the neighborhood, where people were dealing with intense fear, learning about the women who'd been attacked that night, and watching a police manhunt and the arrest of Isaiah Kalebu unfold. The depth of grief in the neighborhood shook me out of my reluctance. The things I learned about the women's strong connection to their community and that they had been planning a wedding before a man broke into their small house while they were sleeping—it brought the purpose of this kind of work back into focus for me. It also defied doing just one story and moving on. I began another story, this one about Isaiah Kalebu's trajectory in the months leading ...
Sonali Deraniyagala was born and raised in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She has an undergraduate degree in Economics from Cambridge University and a doctorate in Economics from the University of Oxford. She is on the faculty of the ... (more)
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While the City Slept
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Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. He is the author... (more)
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While the City Slept
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by Matthew Desmond
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