Pulitzer Prize-winning artist and illustrator Mona Chalabi on her new book, Ten Lives, and wealth in America

​For Ten Lives, her first book, Pulitzer Prize-winning data journalist Mona Chalabi followed ten people with ten different incomes, all of them afraid for their futures. She documents how wealth shaped their feelings, their choices, their identities, and their insecurities. For five years, she researched the data behind their taxes, groceries, and inheritances to understand the systems that keep people stuck.

​But then, she too found herself facing the same fears, when her mother’s sudden illness and subsequent medical bills threatened her own financial safety and made the questions she had been writing about all too real. How much money is enough? To live a “good” life? To protect the people you love in an emergency?

Interweaving her own story with those of her interviewees and illustrated throughout with the data visualizations for which Chalabi is renowned, Ten Lives asks how much wealth it takes to be safe in the United States.

​She'll be joined in conversation by writer Rahawa Haile. Her book, In Open Country, is forthcoming from Little, Brown. It is a blended memoir about her thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail and the politics of free movement in the US.