Journalist and New York Times best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich will speak Tuesday, April 25, in the Mountainlair Gluck Theatre. Her presentation,Bait and Switch,will begin at 7:30 p.m. and will conclude the 2006 installment of WVU s Festival of Ideas series.

In her most recent book,”Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream,”Ehrenreich enters a hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. She looks at the people who have done everything rightearned college degrees, developed marketable skills and impressive rsumsyet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster.

My initial aim was notto tell a story of working in corporate Americabut to try to understand the human underside of corporate Americathe job insecurity, the constant layoffs and downsizings that now occur even in the best of times,explains Ehrenreich.Today, 44 percent of the long-term unemployed are white-collar folks, an unusually high percentage. It’s their world I entered and their story that I tell in’Bait and Switch.’

Ehrenreichs previous release,”Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,”was a New York Times best seller. To research this novel, Ehrenreich left the comfort of her home and moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, cleaning woman, nursing home aide and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the”lowliest”occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts.”Nickel and Dimed”reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety and surprising generosity.

We have Barbara Ehrenreich to thank for bringing us the news of Americas working poor so clearly and directly, and conveying with it a deep moral outrage and a finely textured sense of lives as lived,”writes Dorothy Gallagher of the New York Times Book Review.”As Michael Harrington once was, she [Ehrenreich] is now our premier reporter on the underside of capitalism.

Ehrenreich has been a contributing writer for Time magazine since 1990. Her articles, reviews, essays and humor have appeared in a range of national publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post magazine, Ms., Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, The Nation, The New Republic, Social Policy and Mirabella.

A consistently acclaimed author, Ehrenreich has been hailed by critics asbrilliantandfascinating.A collection of her essays,”The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed,”was described by The New York Times aselegant, trenchant, savagely angry, morally outraged and outrageously funny.

Ehrenreich has received numerous grants and awards, including a Ford Foundation Award for Humanistic Perspectives on Contemporary Society; a Guggenheim Fellowship; and a grant for research and writing from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She has shared the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting and received honorary degrees from Reed College, the State University of New York at Old Westbury, the College of Wooster in Ohio, and La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

Widely known as a public speaker and a frequent radio and television talk show guest, Ehreneich has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia. She has appeared on such national programs asThe Today Show,Good Morning America,Nightline,Crossfire,Politically Incorrect,Charlie RoseandAll Things Considered.

This presentation is free and open to the public. Seating is limited on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Festival of Ideas is produced by WVU Arts&Entertainment.

Additional event information is available online atwww.events.wvu.eduor at 304-293-SHOW (7469).