In the passion of the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1965, Jonathan Kozol gave up the prospect of a promising and secure career within the academic world, moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston, and became a fourth grade teacher.

He has since devoted nearly half a century to the increasingly complex and urgent issues facing public education and to the challenge of providing equal opportunity within our public schools to every child regardless of racial origin or economic level. Today, he is the most widely read and highly honored education writer in America.

Kozol's latest book, Fire in the Ashes, is the major book of his career - a powerful and stirring culmination of the stories he has told for over a quarter century about the children of the poorest urban neighborhood in the United States. Fire in the Ashes follows these children out of their infancy, through the struggles of their adolescence, and into their young adulthood. Though some of their stories are painful and heartbreaking, others are thrilling and dramatic tributes to these children's courage and audacity in refusing to be defeated by the gross inequalities of US education and instead achieve unpredictable and triumphal victories.

Called "today's most eloquent spokesman for America's disenfranchised," he believes that children speak best for themselves and thus relates their testimony through his presentations and his latest book.

Read full bio.