Dirty Kids

"An illuminating and memorable twenty-first-century journey. From this angle, Burning Man looks bourgeois."—Ted Conover, author of Newjack and The Routes of Man

At age twenty-two, writer Chris Urquhart left a life of middle-class comfort to document the lives of these young nomads for a magazine feature. Captivated, she followed them for three more years. In honest prose interspersed with photographs portraying the grimy beauty of nomadic life, Dirty Kids tells the story of how Urquhart lived alongside runaways, crust punks, and dropouts, hippies, Deadheads, and Rainbows in an attempt to belong in their world.

But the road took its toll, and along the way, Urquhart found suffering alongside the freedom— mental health issues, substance abuse, and fears of violence marred her journey. Despite all that, the warm, welcoming family of travelers and their radically alternative culture of sharing, generosity, and non-capitalistic collaboration forever changed her outlook on life and her understanding of freedom.

Chris Urquhart's writing has appeared in Adbusters, COLORS, Maisonneuve, the Santiago Times, and Esquire Russia. Chris lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Micah White is the lifelong activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement, while an editor of Adbusters magazine. Named by Esquire as one of the most influential young thinkers of today, Micah is the author of The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution.

“Dirty Kids is a thought-provoking, vibrant, and essential memoir for diagnosing our times.”
—Micah White, author of The End of Protest, the co-creator Occupy Wall Street movement and former editor of Adbusters

"Part new journalism, part memoir-of-a-breakdown, Dirty Kids brings readers face-to-face with the bliss of freedom, the terror of loneliness, and the hard but true realities of life on the road—and on the rails—in modern day Babylon.”
—Peter Conners, author of Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead

"In Dirty Kids, Urquhart shows us a seldom-glimpsed slice of America with poetic flair and journalistic objectivity."
—Ken Ilgunas, author of Trespassing Across America