An Evening with Andrea Elliott

We are so excited to be welcoming Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Andrea Elliott all the way from New York as she heads to Brigg to chat about her internationally acclaimed non-fiction book, The Invisible Child.

One of Barack Obama's Favourite Books of 2021, The Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. Born at the turn of a new century, Dasani is named for the bottled water that comes to symbolise Brooklyn’s gentrification and the  shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani moves with her family from shelter to shelter, this story traces the passage of Dasani’s ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. Dasani comes of age as New York City’s homeless crisis is exploding. In the shadows of this new Gilded Age, Dasani  leads her seven siblings through a thicket of problems: hunger, parental drug addiction, violence,  housing instability, segregated schools and the constant monitoring of the child-protection system. When, at age thirteen, Dasani enrolls at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, her loyalties are tested like never before. Ultimately, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning the family you love?

By turns heart-breaking and revelatory, provocative and inspiring, Invisible Child tells an astonishing story about the  power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequality.

ANDREA ELLIOTT is an investigative reporter for The New York Times and a former staff writer at the Miami Herald.  Her reporting has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award, a Scripps Howard Award and prizes from the  Overseas Press Club and the American Society of News Editors. She has served as an Emerson fellow at New  America, a visiting journalist at the Russell Sage Foundation and a visiting scholar at the Columbia Population  Research Center, and is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation grant. In 2015, she received Columbia University’s  Medal for Excellence, given to one alumnus or alumna under the age of forty-five. She lives in New York City. This is  her first book.