Zócalo awards the $10,000 prize annually to the nonfiction book that most enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. Our 12 previous winners—a mix of distinguished historians, social scientists, journalists, and public thinkers—include Michael Ignatieff, Sherry Turkle, Jia Lynn Yang, and, most recently, Heather McGhee. Anderson is a professor of property, local government, and environmental justice at Stanford Law School.

The Fight to Save the Town chronicles the stories of Stockton, California; Josephine County, Oregon; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Detroit, Michigan—four places with histories of booms and busts, places that the rest of the nation often readily dismisses for their high levels of poverty and violence. But Anderson, who came across these communities as part of a larger research project on cities that had gone through municipal bankruptcy or state receivership during the Great Recession, found them to be places of hope. Here, people were coming together—to train trauma recovery counselors, to rebuild a broken-down library, to make parkland out of industrial wasteland, to stop foreclosures.

One of our Book Prize judges wrote that in telling these stories, Anderson is able “to explain how much place matters to humans, and what they’re willing to do to save a place buffeted by global forces rather than abandon it. … Anderson’s portraits are a stirring antidote to anti-government cynicism and a call to action against wealth inequality and the disinvestment from public goods.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture by Anderson, who will also be interviewed by Community Coalition CEO and President Alberto Retana, will take place on June 15, 2023, at 7 p.m. PDT, both live in person in Los Angeles and streaming on YouTube. In addition, the program will honor the winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize. Zócalo’s 2023 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked Anderson to talk about communities as teachers, the push and pull between federal policy and local problem-solving, and what it takes to build trust in a place of scarcity.

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