Jill Leovy is the author of Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America and a journalist who currently writes for The Atlantic, The American Scholar, and other publications. Her upcoming book on violence and petty conflict, and how they shape our social lives, will be published by One World Books of Penguin/Random House next year. It draws on Homeric epic, anthropology, and literary and historical studies to tell the story of rancor, envy, revenge and personal violence in the human past, and to connect it to the antagonisms of the present.
Leovy’s first book was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the California Book Award for nonfiction, the Ridenhour Prize for truth-telling, the PEN Center USA Literary Award for research non-fiction, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award. “Ghettoside” introduced the idea that high-crime communities are simultaneously under-policed and over-policed. It broke ground by locating the causes of urban violence in problems of law, not in family structure, culture, psychological differences or other familiar scapegoats. “Ghettoside” was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and the Economist. The criminologist David Kennedy described it as “the most important book about urban violence in a generation.”
A former sociology fellow at Harvard University, Leovy has advised legislators on issues related to inner-city homicide. She is a former newspaper crime reporter who spent more than a decade covering gang killings and police in the highest crime neighborhoods of South Los Angeles. She worked for the Seattle Times, the News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash., and the Los Angeles Times. More recently, her work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the (London) Telegraph, Slate, the Marshall Project and the academic book “Post-Ghetto: Reimagining South Los Angeles” (UC/Huntington Library Press).
Contact Leovy at leovy@usc.edu.