Andrea Elliott
Andrea Elliott\xa0is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for\xa0The New York Times\xa0and a former staff writer at\xa0The Miami Herald. In 2012, Elliott set out to report about what it was like to be an unhoused child in New York City. She met 11-year-old Dasani Coates, living in a shelter with her parents and seven siblings.\xa0 The conditions were unsurprisingly horrible, and the challenges faced by Dasani\u2019s family enormous and multigenerational. Elliott followed Dasani and her family for eight years, and her book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City, weaves together Dasani\u2019s story - including her time at a boarding school designed to help disadvantaged girls escape poverty \u2013 with the history of Dasani\u2019s family, tracing the passage of their ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. It\u2019s the story of a fierce, resilient, and overburdened child \u2013 and the profound impacts of poverty and racism.\xa0 On October 5, 2021, Andrea Elliott spoke with Isabel Duffy about the book - what it took to write it and what she\u2019d like readers to take from it.