Anna Clark
"Journalism opens me up: I look, I listen, I ask, I think. I experience the world as a verb. There's alchemy in fusing the power of language with tangible facts, and the act of trying to tell stories changes me, too. The classic reporter questions are really quite profound, when you think about them: Who? Where? What? When? How? Why?"
“The story of the Flint crisis is disturbing enough even if one knows only a few details. But the entire case, as laid out by Anna Clark, is enraging. Clark has sifted the layers of politics, history, and myopic policy to chronicle the human costs of this tragedy. Flint is not an outlier, it’s a parable – one whose implications matter not just to a single municipality but to every city in the country and all who live in them.”
“A compelling must-read about issues of environmental activism, urban issues, systemic racism, and the accountability of the government to the people it serves.”
“Compelling… A comprehensive account [that] boils down this complex tragedy… While devastating, this account is also inspiring in its coverage of the role of Flint’s “lionhearted residents” and their grassroots activism, community organizing, and independent investigation in bringing the crisis to national attention and to the courts. This extremely informative work gives an authoritative account of a true American urban tragedy that still continues.”
Anna Clark is a journalist living in Detroit. She is the author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy (Metropolitan Books, 2018), which was named one of the year’s best books by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews, Audible, Amazon, the New York Public Library, and others. It won the Hillman Prize in Book Journalism and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award. It was also a finalist for the NYPL Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism, and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. She is a reporter for ProPublica, and her writing has appeared in Elle, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Next City, and other publications. She was a correspondent for the Columbia Journalism Review for nearly five years.
The Poisoned City is also a Michigan Notable Book, and won a State History Award and the Gross Award for Literature. Clark also edited A Detroit Anthology, another Michigan Notable Book, and she is the author of Michigan Literary Luminaries: From Elmore Leonard to Robert Hayden. She was a founding board member and applications director for Write A House through the time that it rehabilitated three vacant homes in Detroit and gave them away to writers, for free. She has also been a writer-in-residence in Detroit high schools through InsideOut Literary Arts for four years, and a longtime co-leader of an improv theater workshop at a men’s prison in Macomb County, Michigan. She co-curates the Motor Signal Reading Series.
When asked about what drew her to the story of Flint's water crisis, Clark said, "Part of what I think has been so discomfiting about the Flint crisis is that it’s threatened our sense of what the common good is. What is the purpose of a city at all? Why do we have a public sector? What are the limits of running these places like a business? What the Flint crisis has shown is how far we can chip away at that undergirding philosophy of the common good before it starts to cause mortal harm to people."
Clark was a Fulbright Fellow creative writing in Nairobi, Kenya, and she received the Excellence in Environmental Journalism award from the Great Lakes Environmental Law Council. Her writing was a “notable” pick in Best American Sports Writing 2012; a “best commentary” finalist from the Mirror Awards; and a first-place winner from SPJ-Detroit in online investigative reporting. She also serves as a contributing editor at Waxwing Literary Journal, where she especially likes to review literature in translation.
A graduate of the University of Michigan’s Residential College, she also holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where she focused on fiction. She lives and works in Detroit.
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