The following description comes from the event organizer.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea Elliott put heart and soul - and much of her real life - in spending eight years following the life of a young girl from Brooklyn, as she grows up and into a world that offers complicated love and daunting challenges to her coming of age and into adult life. As articles in The New York Times published at a point garnered attention, even that attention is woven into the pages of Andrea Elliott’s brilliant, harrowing, stirring story, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City (Random House).

“Elliott’s book is a triumph of in-depth reporting and storytelling. It is a visceral blow-by-blow depiction of what ‘structural racism’ has meant in the lives of generations of one family. But above all else it is a celebration of a little girl—an unforgettable heroine whose frustration, elation, exhaustion, and intelligence will haunt your heart.”—Ariel Levy.

“Stunning . . . a remarkable achievement that speaks to the heart and conscience of a nation.”—Publishers Weekly.

“From its first indelible pages to its rich and startling conclusion, Invisible Child had me, by turns, stricken, inspired, outraged, illuminated, in tears, and hungering for reimmersion in its Dickensian depths. 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.

 Joining Andrea Elliott in conversation this evening will be award-winning Seattle journalist and author Claudia Rowe, whose most recent book is The Spider and the Fly.