Jonathan Kozol

Jonathan Kozol is a well-known activist and National Book Award–winning author who has focused his writings and efforts on ending illiteracy, improving the economic conditions of the poverty-stricken, and pricking the consciences of affluent Americans for over forty years. Since his early account of teaching at a public school in Roxbury, Death at an Early Age, many of his writings have pertained to his career as a public school advocate and educator and his experience as an activist on education issues. In Free Schools, he recounted his experiences in setting up a free school in Boston. Illiterate America, a seminal work in Kozol's exploration of illiteracy, draws on the author's background as a grass-roots organizer to outline his proposal for dealing with the problem of illiteracy in the United States. In Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America, Kozol looked closely at homeless families living in a shelter in New York City. In 1991 he returned to the subject of education in the bestselling Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, in which he pointed out the gross inequalities in school quality from community to community. With Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation and Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope, Kozol put a human face on the conditions experienced by residents of Mott Haven, the poorest neighborhood in New York City.