RSF Announces 2022-2023 Visiting Journalists
L-R: Sarah Carr, Louise Story, Anna Louie Sussman
The Russell Sage Foundation is pleased to announce the selection of three visiting journalists for the 2022-2023 academic year: Sarah Carr, Louise Story, and Anna Louie Sussman. Their journalistic work on a range of urgent issues in American life, including education, the racial wealth gap, and economics and reproduction, intersects with the foundation’s support of scholarship that examines current social, economic, and political conditions.
Sarah Carr is O’Brien Fellow in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University, an independent journalist, and editor at the Hechinger Report. As an RSF visiting journalist, Carr will write a book following a diverse set of families as they attempt to help their children become literate, examining the ways in which race and ethnicity, as well as immigration and socioeconomic status, shape their capacity to access the supports and tools their children need to learn to read. The book will use a combination of social science research, history, and storytelling to show how literacy supports continue to be commodified in America. Carr will scrutinize the persistent role of implicit bias in deciding who deserves what should be a universal right to literacy.
Carr is the author of Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children. She previously led an investigative team at the Boston Globe dedicated to reporting on education equity and oversaw the education fellowship, “The Teacher Project” at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She has written for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Nation, Slate, and other news outlets.
Louise Story is an independent journalist. As an RSF visiting journalist, Story will research and write about the history of the racial wealth gap, with a special focus on Black Americans. Her project (in partnership with journalist Ebony Reed) will focus on contemporary Black millennials who are trying to increase their families' wealth. Story will examine how these families' histories - as well as the history of the racial wealth gap - inform their lives today. Story will examine a range of factors that contribute to the racial wealth gap, including homeownership, stock and other investment ownership, business formation, banking policy, trends in income, discrimination in hiring and work policies, loans, and bankruptcy.
Story wrote and executive produced the documentary “The Kleptocrats,” which grew out of one of her investigations. Most recently, she was the Chief News Strategist and Chief Product & Technology Officer at the Wall Street Journal. Prior to her role at The Wall Street Journal, she worked at The New York Times for over a decade. She has written for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, the Orlando Sentinel, and the Hartford Courant.
Anna Louie Sussman is an independent journalist. As an RSF visiting scholar, Sussman will work on a book about how many features of our current version of capitalism have become inimical to human reproduction and family life. It explores how such aspects of our contemporary economic and social system – high and growing inequality, environmental destruction and toxic exposure, the financialization of everything, and the seeming abundance of choice and opportunity – affect whether and how we can create the families we desire.
Sussman was previously a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. She is a Class of 2022 New America Fellow, and has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, residencies, and awards including from the Logan Nonfiction Program, MacDowell, and the Fetisov Journalism Awards, among others. She has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other publications.
Click here to learn more about the RSF visiting journalist program.