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In October 2012, outside a city-run shelter in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the New York Times reporter Andrea Elliott met an eleven-year-old girl named Dasani. Dasani lived with her parents and seven siblings in a single 520-square-foot room at the Auburn Family Residence, one of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York City. Elliott’s five-part series about her ran on the front page of the Times in December 2013. She then kept reporting for eight years in all, filling more than 90 notebooks and gathering some 14,000 pages of records, and the result, Invisible Child, won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. This guide covers her one key book, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 1 key book · 2021–2021 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Andrea Elliott has written one book: Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City (2021), which follows Dasani Coates from age eleven in a Brooklyn homeless shelter to young adulthood. It won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Start there; her 2013 New York Times series of the same name is where the story began.
Where to Start with Andrea Elliott
If you have never read her
→ Invisible Child (2021) — her only book, eight years in the life of one New York family.
If you want to understand child poverty in America
→ Invisible Child (2021) — one girl’s story set against the city’s housing and welfare policy.
If you read the 2013 Times series
→ Invisible Child (2021) — the book follows Dasani for years after the series ended.
Andrea Elliott’s Book
Invisible Child
Dasani Coates is eleven when the book opens in 2012, living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and seven siblings in one room of the Auburn Family Residence, a Brooklyn shelter. Elliott follows her for eight years, through hunger, violence, addiction and the threat of foster care, to the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania, and traces the family back through the Great Migration to slavery. Random House published it on 5 October 2021; besides the Pulitzer it won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award and the Gotham Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
How to Read Andrea Elliott
There is one book, and it is best read straight through: it runs in time order from 2012 to about 2020, with chapters that step back to Dasani’s ancestors and to the city policies of the Bloomberg and de Blasio years. Elliott keeps her own sources and methods mostly to the notes and an afterword.
If you want to see where it started, read the five-part series “Invisible Child” that the New York Times published in December 2013, then the book, which picks up the story long after the series ended. The Times Magazine ran an excerpt of more than 11,000 words, “When Dasani Left Home”, in September 2021.
A reading path
1. “Invisible Child”, The New York Times (2013)
2. Invisible Child (2021)
3. “When Dasani Left Home”, The New York Times Magazine (2021)
Everything Else Andrea Elliott Published
Beyond the 1 key book: 1 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Newspaper series
1
1 book · 2013
- 2013Invisible Childfive-part New York Times series on Dasani, December 2013, which won a George Polk Award
The years · 2003–2022
Quick facts about Andrea Elliott
- Known for
- Long-form, immersive reporting on people at the edges of American life, from Muslim immigrants after 9/11 to a homeless girl in Brooklyn.
- 2003
- Joins The New York Times
- 2007
- Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing
- 2013
- “Invisible Child” series in the Times
- 2021
- Invisible Child
- 2022
- Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
- Born
- Washington, D.C., to a Chilean mother and an American father
- Education
- Occidental College (comparative literature); Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
- Worked
- The Miami Herald from 2000; The New York Times from 2003, as a metro, then investigative, reporter
- Pulitzers
- Feature Writing (2007), for “An Imam in America”; General Nonfiction (2022), for Invisible Child
- First
- The first woman to win individual Pulitzers in both Journalism and Letters
- Teaching
- Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence at Princeton University
The red mark is 2021: Invisible Child, her first and so far only book.
How Andrea Elliott Writes: Deep Immersion
Elliott calls herself “an immersionist”. For Invisible Child she spent whole days and weekends with Dasani’s family over eight years, rarely going more than a week or two without speaking to them, and moved with the story between Brooklyn, Staten Island and Hershey, Pennsylvania. She kept more than 90 notebooks and over 120 hours of audio, and the family’s own phone recordings filled gaps when she was not there.
The reporting is backed by paper. With the family’s help she gathered some 14,000 pages of records, from report cards and court files to drug tests, and organised everything on a single colour-coded timeline, with the mother, city policy and police records each in their own colour. She used a Freedom of Information Act request to confirm that Dasani’s great-grandfather served in an all-Black regiment in Italy in the Second World War, a thread that ties the family’s story to the GI Bill benefits Black veterans were largely denied.
She tells the story largely through Dasani’s experience and steps back to explain the housing and welfare policies shaping each scene; the Pulitzer board praised the way the book “merges literary narrative with policy analysis”. Before publication she read the book aloud to Dasani and her sister, paragraph by paragraph. For writers who report poverty the same way, start with Authors like Matthew Desmond.
Watch
Andrea Elliott on Invisible Child
Elliott talks with Darcey Merritt of the NYU Silver School of Social Work about Invisible Child at an event hosted by the Institute for Research on Poverty in January 2022.
Frequently asked questions about Andrea Elliott’s books
How many books has Andrea Elliott written?
One: Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City (2021). The rest of her work is journalism for The New York Times, including the 2013 series the book grew out of.
What are Andrea Elliott’s books in order?
There is one book, Invisible Child (2021). It expands her five-part New York Times series “Invisible Child”, published in December 2013.
Where should I start with Andrea Elliott?
With Invisible Child, her only book. If you want a shorter way in, read the 2013 Times series first; the book carries the story years further.
What is Andrea Elliott’s most famous book?
Invisible Child (2021). It won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and was named one of the ten best books of 2021 by The New York Times Book Review.
Is Invisible Child a true story?
Yes. It is nonfiction about a real girl, Dasani Coates, and her family, reported over eight years from 2012 and backed by some 14,000 pages of records. Dasani and her family checked the book with Elliott before it was published.
What happened to Dasani from Invisible Child?
She won a place at the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania, later left to rejoin her family, and became the first in her family to graduate from high school. In December 2021, at twenty, she was working part-time and studying business at a community college.
What awards did Invisible Child win?
The 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Gotham Book Prize, all in 2022. It was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
How many Pulitzer Prizes has Andrea Elliott won?
Two: Feature Writing in 2007, for “An Imam in America”, her New York Times series on Sheik Reda Shata, an Egyptian-born imam in Brooklyn; and General Nonfiction in 2022, for Invisible Child. She is the first woman to win individual Pulitzers in both Journalism and Letters.
Was Andrea Elliott’s imam series criticised?
Yes, by at least one critic. In April 2007 the journalist Jonathan S. Tobin argued in The Jewish Exponent that the Pulitzer-winning series left out that a sermon it portrayed sympathetically had been given by a previous imam at the mosque, and that a congregant had later carried out the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge shooting.
Footnotes
- Andrea Elliott — Wikipedia
- Invisible Child — Wikipedia
- Andrea Elliott, 2022 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction — The Pulitzer Prizes
- How an “immersionist” held up the story of one homeless child — Nieman Storyboard, 2021
- Andrea Elliott on writing Invisible Child — Penguin, 2022
- Andrea Elliott wins the 2022 Helen Bernstein Award — New York Public Library
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I see this book as an act of witness more than anything else.”
— Andrea Elliott, interview with Penguin on Invisible Child (2022)
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