The Medical Debt team will facilitate a conversation with Kristin Collier about her new book What Debt Demands: Family Betrayal, and Precarity in a Broken System (Grand Central Publishing). The book charts her discovery, as a young person, that someone she loved had acquired over $200,000 of fraudulent private student loans in her name. As Collier seeks relief from that debt burden, she looks to the history of the student lending system more broadly to understand the mechanisms that allowed this theft to occur and have allowed 44 million debtors to be stranded with their own unpayable, unjust debts. Using memoir, reporting, and history, she unpacks how debt has shaped our physical, interior, and social worlds.

Kristin Collier’s writing has been published in The Nation, Longform, and Los Angeles Review of Books and has been anthologized in American Precariat (Coffee House Press). She is a former high school teacher and currently a visiting professor at Metro State University where she teaches in TREC, their higher education in prison program. She’s also a longtime member of the Debt Collective.