Best Video Film & Cultural Center is honored to present critically acclaimed author, Pulitzer finalist, and Hamden resident Nicholas Dawidoff in conversation with Dr. Khalilah Brown-Dean at 7 p.m. on TuesdayDec. 13. Dawidoff’s 2022 book, “The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice and the American City,” is a landmark work of intimate reporting on inequality, race, class and violence, told through murder and intersecting lives in an iconic American neighborhood.
One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a retired grandfather was shot point-blank by a young stranger. A hasty police investigation culminated in innocent 16-year-old Bobby being sentenced to prison for 38 years. New Haven native and acclaimed author Dawidoff returned home and spent eight years reporting the deeper story of this injustice, and what it reveals about the enduring legacies of social and economic disparity.
In “The Other Side of Prospect,” he has produced an immersive portrait of a seminal community in an old American city now beset by division and gun violence. Tracing the histories of three people whose lives meet in tragedy — victim Pete Fields, likely murderer Major, and Bobby — Dawidoff indelibly describes optimistic families coming north from South Carolina as part of the Great Migration for the promise of opportunity and upward mobility and the harrowing costs of deindustrialization and neglect.
After years in prison, with the help of a true-believing lawyer, Bobby is finally set free. His subsequent struggles with the memories of prison, and his heartbreaking efforts to reconnect with family and community, exemplify the challenges the formerly incarcerated face upon reentry into society and, writes Reginald Dwayne Betts, make this “the best book about the crisis of incarceration in America.”
“The Other Side of Prospect” is a reportorial tour de force, at once a sweeping account of how the injustices of racism and inequality reverberate through the generations, and a beautifully written portrait of American city life told through a group of unforgettable people and their intertwined experiences.
Dawidoff is the author of five books, including “The Catcher Was a Spy” and “In the Country of a Country.” He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and has also been a Guggenheim, Berlin Prize and Art for Justice fellow.
Dr. Khalilah L. Brown-Dean is an Award-Winning Scholar, Educator, and Author. Her scholarship centers the importance of identity in shaping access to democracy with a particular emphasis on voting rights, civic engagement, and punishment. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from The Ohio State University (2003) and a Bachelor of Arts in Government from The University of Virginia (1998). She is Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs and Professor of Political Science at Quinnipiac University. In 2021 she was recognized as a Spotlight Recipient by the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame.
Dr. Brown-Dean’s scholarship appears in numerous scholarly publications and popular outlets. Her book Identity Politics in the United States traces the confluence of public policy, law, and institutional design in structuring political divisions. Her newest book project, Protesting Vulnerability: Race and Pandemic Politics, is under contract with Cambridge University Press and co-authored with Professor Ray Block Jr. of Penn State University. She is co-author of a Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies report on the contemporary status of voting rights in the United States that was presented during the 50th Anniversary of the Bloody Sunday March in Selma, Alabama.
Brown-Dean is a highly sought-after political analyst and commentator whose work appears in over 400 major media outlets. She hosts the radio show and podcast, Disrupted, for Connecticut Public Radio and is featured in the documentaries, “The Color of Justice” and “Extinction.” Diverse Magazine named her one of the 25 Most Influential Women in Higher Education. You can learn more about her work at kbdphd.com.