Alissa Quart

Author, Journalist and Poet

Alissa Quart is the author of five books of nonfiction including Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream (Ecco, 2022), Squeezed (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2018) and Branded (Basic Books, 2004). She is the Executive Director of the non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which she collaborated on with the late Barbara Ehrenreich. She is also the author of two books of poetry and the creator of “Going for Broke," also producing the show's first season, a podcast. She has written for many publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and TIME. Her awards include an Emmy, an SPJ Award, and a Nieman fellowship. She lives with her family in Brooklyn. 

Related

Works
Image of Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers and Rebels
Image of Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America
Image of Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream
Interviews
Twitterstorm So You've Been Cancelled

Journalist Alissa Quart thinks it's unfair when people's reputations are torn to shreds on Twitter for saying the wrong thing. She even wrote a poem about it.
man moving steel Even With Jobs, The Middle Class Is Feeling the Squeeze

Alissa Quart spent the last few years traveling around the country, talking with all kinds of people about work. What she found is a lot of people with jobs that look good on paper but who feel — in a word — squeezed.
"The Days Of Abandonment" by Elena Ferrante Alissa Quart On 'Days of Abandonment' and 'Sleepless Nights'

Alissa Quart recommends Elena Ferrante's "Days of Abandonment" and Elizabeth Hardwick's "Sleepless Nights."
parents A Parenting Movement Emerges From the Pandemic

When the pandemic hit, it laid bare just how precarious parenting arrangements were — especially for single parents, parents who can't work from home, and the unemployed. Working mothers in particular lost jobs or were forced to quit to take care of children at home. Journalist Alissa Quart spoke with Shannon about why a "parenting revolution" might be on the horizon.
the looming monster of american myth Why rugged individualism is a dangerous myth

Social critic Alissa Quart says the American ideal of the self-made, rugged individual is built on a lie. In her book "Bootstrapped," she argues that even the people who preached the gospel of self-reliance, like Laura Ingalls Wilder and Henry David Thoreau, didn’t live up to it themselves. 
Shows
Working and parenting, a balancing act A Parenting Revolution
blurry man at podium Filtering Free Speech
Workers of all stripes What's Wrong With Work?
Typewriter Telling A Life
Websites
economichardship.org
alissaquart.com