Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

Andrea Elliott is the author of Invisible Child. Though she appears in the work sparingly, Elliott witnessed most of the events in the book. She met Dasani and her family while completing an investigative journalism series for The New York Times, which evolved into the book-length project (620-29). She describes herself as “less of a traditional reporter and more of an ‘immersionist’” (294).

She often presents the work through literary devices and narrative techniques more commonly associated with fiction, spending a great deal of time with her subjects in the hope of understanding how they experience their lives. Elliott won the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for Invisible Child. More recently, according to her website, she has joined Princeton as faculty in the journalism program. Previously, she worked as a journalist for The New York Times, where she specialized in long-form journalism. This work no doubt prepared her for Invisible Child, a work that covers eight years in its subjects’ lives and provides family backgrounds going back, on Chanel’s side, to before the Civil War.

DASANI AND HER FAMILY

The figures below are key figures from Dasani’s family, the central family featured in Invisible Child.