WHILE THE CITY SLEPT

By Eli Sanders
Viking, February 2, 2016

In this riveting, probing, compassionate account of the 2009 murder of Teresa Butz, Eli Sanders, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper coverage of the crime, offers a deeply reported portrait, in microcosm, of the state of mental health care in this country—as well as an inspiring story of love and forgiveness.

Selected Praise

“A devastatingly preventable crime is at the center of this book, and yet it is the love, courage, and empathy of the people involved—and of the author—that stay with you. Written with great sensitivity and even greater beauty, it is about so many things: a city, childhood, family, failure, loss, horror, forgiveness. It is, very nearly, about everything.”
—Jeff Hobbs, New York Times bestselling author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

“Sanders’s meticulous narrative gives full weight to Kalebu’s crime while elucidating the human tragedy that sparked it, forming a disturbing indictment of society’s neglect of the mentally ill.” —Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Eli Sanders is the associate editor of Seattle’s weekly newspaper The Stranger. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2012 for his reporting on the murder of Teresa Butz. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Seattle Times, The American Prospect, and Salon, among other publications. Sanders lives in Seattle.

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