Andrea Elliott

City Arts & Lectures

Andrea Elliott is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times and a former staff writer at The 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. The conditions were unsurprisingly horrible, and the challenges faced by Dasani’s 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’s story - including her time at a boarding school designed to help disadvantaged girls escape poverty – with the history of Dasani’s family, tracing the passage of their ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. It’s the story of a fierce, resilient, and overburdened child – and the profound impacts of poverty and racism. On October 5, 2021, Andrea Elliott spoke with Isabel Duffy about the book - what it took to write it and what she’d like readers to take from it.