Anna Clark

Anna Clark is a journalist in Detroit. She’s the author of "The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy," named one of best books of the year by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus, the New York Public Library, and others. It recounts the story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail—and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal. "The Poisoned City" is the winner of the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism and a Michigan Notable Book. It was also a finalist for the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Anna’s articles have appeared in Elle, the New York Times, Politico, the Columbia Journalism Review, Next City, and other places. She has received edited "A Detroit Anthology," another Michigan Notable Book, and wrote a small book on the literary culture of the Great Lakes State. Anna has been a Fulbright fellow in Nairobi, Kenya, a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan, and a live-in member of an intentional community in Boston called Haley House. She has a master's in fine arts from Warren Wilson College, where she specialized in fiction, and she co-curates the Motor Signal Reading Series in Detroit's Eastern Market. She has been a long-time facilitator of improv theater and creative workshops in Michigan prisons and detention centers.

Sub-specialties

• Drinking water, lead (history + toxicity), infrastructure, water shutoffs, water affordability urban disinvestment, segregation, infrastructure inequality, community organizing, concentrated poverty, urban sprawl, emergency management
• The Great Lakes, urban rivers, water policy, development
• Journalism, local news, freelancing, the need for a strong infrastructure for local reporting
• Literature, literary culture, the creative arts in prisons and detention centers