Mitchell Duneier earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His first book, Slim's Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity, which was largely his dissertation, won the 1994 American Sociological Association's award for Distinguished Scholarly Publication, an unheard-of achievement for a dissertation. His research for this work consisted of listening to the stories of men gathered at a cafeteria in Hyde Park, Chicago, where he ate his meals for four years. Similarly, for Sidewalk (2000), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the C. Wright Mills Award, he spent five years observing the world of street vending in Greenwich Village. He is now working on Andrea's Dream, a book drawn from a series of articles he wrote for the Chicago Tribune about Chicago word processors, it will include comparisons with analogous workers in third-world countries. Professor Duneier taught at the University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of Wisconsin- Madison before coming to The Graduate Center. He serves on the advisory board for National Public Radio's "This American Life."