Catherine Coleman Flowers

Catherine Coleman Flowers is the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, and since 2008 has been the rural development manager at the Race and Poverty Initiative of the Equal Justice Initiative. She is the author of Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret, winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize for a first book in the public interest (from The New Press). In 2020, Flowers was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama.

News and Reviews

Fresh Air

Listen to an interview with author Catherine Coleman Flowers on NPR’s Fresh Air.

Author Interview

Read an interview with author Catherine Coleman Flowers about her journey as an activist, America's dirty secret, and the problems it poses to t the country’s most vulnerable.

New York Times

Read the essay “Mold, Possums and Pools of Sewage: No One Should Have to Live Like This,” adapted from Waste in the New York Times.

Books by Catherine Coleman Flowers

Waste
One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret

Catherine Coleman Flowers