Andrea Elliott

Pulitzer Prize Winner • Bestselling Author • Journalist

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Andrea Elliott is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has documented the lives of poor Americans, Muslim immigrants and other people on the margins of power. She is an investigative reporter for The New York Times and the author of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

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 symbolize Brooklyn’s gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani grows up, moving with her tight-knit family from shelter to shelter, this story goes back to trace the passage of Dasani’s ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. By the time Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis is exploding as the chasm deepens between rich and poor. In the shadows of this new Gilded Age, Dasani must lead 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. As she learns to “code switch” between the culture she left behind and the norms of her new town, Dasani starts to feel like a stranger in both places. Ultimately, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning the family you love?

“This book is so many things: a staggering feat of reporting, an act of profound civic love, an extraordinarily moving tale about the fierceness of family love, and above all, a future American classic.”

—Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies

By turns heartbreaking 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. Based on nearly a decade of reporting, this book vividly illuminates some of the most critical issues in contemporary America through the life of one remarkable girl.

“Unflinching, tenacious reporting… A vivid and devastating story of American inequality.”

—Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted

Elliott is also the recipient of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, a George Polk award, an Overseas Press Club Award and was awarded a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. In 2015, she was awarded Columbia University’s Medal for Excellence, given to one alumnus under the age of 45. She has also received honorary doctorates from Occidental College and from Niagara University, which cited her “courage, perseverance, and a commitment to fairness for those without a public voice rarely demonstrated among writers today,” and served as a visiting lecturer and Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University in 2023.

Elliott came to The New York Times from The Miami Herald, where she covered crime, immigration and Latin American politics. Raised in Washington, D.C. by a Chilean mother and an American father, she attended Occidental College before earning a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

For more information on Andrea Elliott, please visit her on Instagram, Twitter, or at andrea-elliott.com.

Andrea Elliott is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has documented the lives of poor Americans, Muslim immigrants and other people on the margins of power. She is an investigative reporter for The New York Times and the author of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

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 symbolize Brooklyn’s gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani grows up, moving with her tight-knit family from shelter to shelter, this story goes back to trace the passage of Dasani’s ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. By the time Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis is exploding as the chasm deepens between rich and poor. In the shadows of this new Gilded Age, Dasani must lead 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. As she learns to “code switch” between the culture she left behind and the norms of her new town, Dasani starts to feel like a stranger in both places. Ultimately, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning the family you love?

“This book is so many things: a staggering feat of reporting, an act of profound civic love, an extraordinarily moving tale about the fierceness of family love, and above all, a future American classic.”

—Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies

By turns heartbreaking 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. Based on nearly a decade of reporting, this book vividly illuminates some of the most critical issues in contemporary America through the life of one remarkable girl.

“Unflinching, tenacious reporting… A vivid and devastating story of American inequality.”

—Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted

Elliott is also the recipient of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, a George Polk award, an Overseas Press Club Award and was awarded a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. In 2015, she was awarded Columbia University’s Medal for Excellence, given to one alumnus under the age of 45. She has also received honorary doctorates from Occidental College and from Niagara University, which cited her “courage, perseverance, and a commitment to fairness for those without a public voice rarely demonstrated among writers today,” and served as a visiting lecturer and Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University in 2023.

Elliott came to The New York Times from The Miami Herald, where she covered crime, immigration and Latin American politics. Raised in Washington, D.C. by a Chilean mother and an American father, she attended Occidental College before earning a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

For more information on Andrea Elliott, please visit her on Instagram, Twitter, or at andrea-elliott.com.

Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City (Random House, 2021)

Selected Articles

When Dasani Left Home, New York Times Magazine
Invisible Child: Girl in the Shadows: Dasani’s Homeless Life, New York Times (from the “Invisible Child” series)
A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn, Reconciling 2 Worlds, New York Times (from the “An Imam in America” series)
Where Boys Grow Up to Be Jihadis, New York Times Magazine
Sorting Out Life as Muslims and Marines, New York Times (from the “Faith and War” series)

2022 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, Invisible Child
2022 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, Invisible Child
2022 Helen Bernstein Book Award, Invisible Child
2022 Gotham Book Prize, Invisible Child
2022 Goddard Riverside Prize, Invisible Child
2014 George Polk Award Local Reporting
2014 David Aronson Award Social Justice Reporting
2014 Scripps Howard Award Human Interest Reporting
2013 Society of Professional Journalists Feature Reporting
2007 American Society of Newspaper Editors Award Diversity Writing
2007 Overseas Press Club Best Magazine Reporting from Abroad
2007 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing, “An Imam in America” series

Seeing and hearing Andrea Elliott and Dasani Coates together was a moving and invaluable experience for all who attended. In the audience were people who work for government agencies, the nonprofit sector, educational institutions and who are donors and volunteers. The event spoke to all of these groups, leaving them with a desire to think more critically about how we can be better advocates and neighbors to families like Dasani’s.

United Way of Central Indiana

Thank you so much for speaking at our Anti-Poverty Advocates Summit last week. It was a true highlight of the event, and folks were singing your praises to our team for the rest of the week. Your work on Invisible Child breeds true empathy, and I will continue to recommend it to everyone that I can.

Empower Missouri

Andrea and Dasani were a dream. The crowd was so enamored with them and loved their message and dynamic. Many attendees said this was our best one ever!

United Way of Central and Northeastern Connecticut

Elliott is a masterful storyteller and, by sharing Dasani’s story, she calls on all of us to dismantle the systems that so often failed her and countless others.

NPR

Elliott spins out a deeply moving story about Dasani and her family, whose struggles underscore the stresses of growing up poor and Black in an American city, and the utter failure of institutions to extend a helping hand. Invisible Child is a triumph.

Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here