A white man with tousled dark hair peers over the top of a book. He's wearing horn-rim glasses, a Beck T-shirt, and a wedding band on the hand holding the book. The book cover shows a baby-blue piggy bank with coins falling into it. The title is "The Rend East First."

Eric Sirota

2 Posts

Eric Sirota is a Best of the Net-nominated poet and housing justice lawyer living in Chicago. He is the director of the Tenant Advocacy Clinic at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Formerly, he served as director of housing justice at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law. Eric's poetry has been published in Entropy, Voicemail Poems, Barren, and elsewhere. His full-length poetry debut, "The Rent Eats First," was released in 2024 by Button Poetry.
An expansive desert scene showing two figures wandering in the distance. Footprints in the sand trail behind them.
Poetry

Poem: Exodus

June 23, 2026 | Eric Sirota

A poem by housing attorney Eric Sirota that highlights the existential absurdity of our system’s treatment of low-income renters.

Poetry

Poem: …after a loss in a Midwest courthouse

January 2, 2025 | Eric Sirota

A housing justice lawyer turns the reality of housing court into a searing poem.