Andrea Elliott is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the New York Times. Through December 2013 she published a five-part series in the paper exploring the homelessness epidemic in New York City. It told the story of Dasani Coates, an 11-year-old girl living with her family in a run-down homeless shelter in Brooklyn. Elliott continued to follow the family over the course of almost a decade, recording their experiences in her first book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in New York City, published last year. Elliott’s maternal family fled Chile during the Pinochet era. She lives in New York with her two children.
How did you choose Dasani?
What mattered most to me was finding a child who wanted to be heard and who could narrate her experience of growing up poor to me. I think it’s incredibly important, it’s essential, to give a voice to the person whose story I’m telling. It’s important to have a communicator, because I think the best writing and reporting rests on the power of intimacy. She was a kid it was almost impossible to keep quiet. She had so much to say and I wanted to hear every word of it.
