Saket Soni is an award-winning labor organizer and author who has worked at the intersection of climate and migration for two decades. He is the founder and director of Resilience Force, a nonprofit organization that came out of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast. Resilience Force rebuilds the homes of U.S. climate refugees after hurricanes, floods, and fires, and protects the workers who carry out the rebuilding. Soni was awarded the 2024 John P. McNulty Prize, given to leaders of \u201cmoral courage, bold vision, and deep, lasting impact.\u201d Soni\u2019s book, The Great Escape<\/i>: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America<\/i>, tells the story of human trafficking on the post-Hurricane Katrina Gulf Coast. It received the 2024 PEN America John K. Galbraith Award for nonfiction and was named one of The New York Times<\/i>\u2019 \u201c100 Notable Books\u201d of 2023.<\/p>
Soni\u2019s next book, Hurricane Hustlers<\/i> (under contract with Crown Publishing), is a deeply reported look inside the soon-to-be trillion-dollar climate disaster recovery economy, through the lives of people entrenched in the hustle\u2014including undocumented immigrant roofers, the CEOs of major restoration companies, and Federal Emergency Management Agency czars. As disasters have intensified, so have the policy debates surrounding them, culminating recently in the American president mulling over the abolition of FEMA, even as fires and floods rage. Embedded in disaster recovery since Hurricane Katrina, Soni follows interconnected characters over two decades of rebuilding America, amid ever more furious storms.<\/p>Selected Work<\/h2>