Alissa Quart

Here is a detailed biography of Alissa Quart (born 1972):

Alissa Quart — Life, Work & Influence


Alissa Quart is an American journalist, nonfiction writer, poet, and editor. She leads efforts on economic justice through the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and authors books probing inequality, culture, and the pressures of modern life.

Introduction

Alissa Quart (born 1972) is a multifaceted American writer, critic, journalist, editor, and poet. Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting journalism about inequality and marginalized communities.

Until you tell me otherwise, I’ll assume “born: 1972” is correct (exact month/day is not publicly documented).

Early Life & Education

  • Alissa Quart was born in New York City and grew up in lower Manhattan.

  • Her parents were both college professors.

  • She attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City.

  • She earned her BA in English Literature, with Honors (Creative Writing) from Brown University in 1994.

  • After undergraduate studies, she did graduate work in English Literature for a year at the CUNY Graduate Center.

  • Later, she completed an MS in Journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1997.

Career & Major Works

Early Writing & Criticism

Quart’s early career interwove cultural criticism, essays, and journalism. She has written for prominent publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, TIME, among others. hyperlink cinema in 2005, describing how films connect stories via intersecting narratives and visual/textual cues.

Books & Major Themes

Alissa Quart has authored several influential books of nonfiction and poetry:

Nonfiction works include:

  • Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers (2003) — explores how consumer culture targets adolescents.

  • Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (2007) — critiques extreme parenting and pressures on talented children.

  • Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers and Rebels (2013) — examines the influence of cultural outsiders in reshaping society.

  • Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America (2018) — addresses how rising costs stress middle and working families.

  • Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream (2023) — challenges the myth of self-reliance and unpacks how people survive under economic strain.

Poetry works include:

  • Monetized (2015) — poems about consumerism, internet culture, identity.

  • Thoughts and Prayers (2019) — addresses themes of grief, social crises, and cultural response.

Her work often blends personal narrative, sociological insight, and cultural critique, focusing on how macro forces (economics, media, policy) shape everyday experience.

Leadership & Economic Hardship Reporting Project

Quart is the Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP).

She also teaches at universities (e.g. Columbia Journalism School) and has been a Nieman Fellow (Harvard) in 2010.

She has produced multimedia work: for example, her collaborative multimedia story The Last Clinic was nominated for a National Magazine Award and a Documentary Emmy.

Recognition & Impact

  • Quart received a Nieman Fellowship (2010).

  • Her films and multimedia work have been Emmy-nominated or awarded.

  • She has been honored with awards in journalism (e.g. SPJ award) and recognition for her contributions to cultural discourse.

  • Her work has reshaped public conversations about economic precarity, inequality, the burdens on families, and the limits of the “American Dream.”

Themes & Philosophy

A few recurring themes in Quart’s writing and mission:

  1. Inequality & economic precarity — she highlights how many people are squeezed by systemic forces, not just individual failure.

  2. Reassessing the myths of self-reliance — in Bootstrapped, she argues that much of American ideology around “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is illusory.

  3. Cultural outsiders as agents of change — she elevates voices often dismissed (amateurs, rebels, marginalized communities).

  4. Interplay of the personal and structural — she often uses personal narrative to illustrate broader social forces.

  5. Narrative justice — through EHRP, she works to ensure stories from underrepresented communities are told with depth and dignity.

Personal Life

  • Alissa Quart is married to journalist Peter Maass.

  • They live in Brooklyn, New York with their family.

Articles by the author

Having been built in the fashion I was as a child - created and then deflated - has left me with a distinct feeling of failure. Because I did not live up to my precocity, I experience it to be like a cross between a has-been and a never-was.

Alissa Quart

Giftedness gives you this amazing tool kit for handling self-discipline and gives you an area of knowledge, but then it also gives you this weird set of aspirations.

Alissa Quart

I think cool originates with the jazz culture in the '40s. There was probably cool before that, but that's when people started talking about cool - Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a bunch of other early, cool jazz folk.

Alissa Quart

Economically anxious, many parents see their children's accomplishments as a sort of insurance against the financial challenges of old age; high-achieving kids, this logic goes, will become high-earning adults and therefore be better able to help Mom and Dad pay for the assisted-living facility in a few decades.

Alissa Quart

Like other elements of childhood for the precociously gifted - private or home schooling, overstructured activity, and proto-professional training - edutainment products are part of a system that divides children into haves and have-lesses.

Alissa Quart

The list of costly services that supplement some children's public education is growing longer and now includes consultants, tutors, and test prep. That's in addition to the homework help some stay-at-home parents can afford to provide.

Alissa Quart

There's no better example of how to lead a difficult employee than to have a child. You have another kind of knowledge from your children that's actually applicable outside of childbearing.

Alissa Quart

While more people are working later in life because of happy things like longer life expectancy, they are also doing so because of very sad things, like a lack of Social Security benefits or retirement plans.

Alissa Quart

Neurohumanities offers a way to tap the popular enthusiasm for science and, in part, gin up more funding for humanities.

Alissa Quart

If we could support school curricula about social class, we might discuss the full complexity of 'wealth' within the parameters of our children's educational lives. Out of these lesson plans, we might talk more about what society values - and whether it rewards the right things.

Alissa Quart

When I was a young child, professional aspiration was synonymous to me with the clatter of my mother's high-heeled boots as she went off to teach each 1970s weekday morning, carrying her graded blue books under her arm.

Alissa Quart

When I was doing my research for 'Branded,' I'd meet groups of teenagers and preteenagers or tweens, and they would laugh at a magazine spread in a women's magazine or teen girl magazine and say, 'I'd never buy this outfit. I know these girls are starving themselves.' But they probably would go out and buy the thing eventually.

Alissa Quart

There is a set of emotions around money and new technology and advertising and that sort of thing, and there is this kind of changing, transforming way we go through the world happening. The lyrical eye, the perspective of poetry, can get to something like this when other forms of writing can't.

Alissa Quart

An IPO-mad technology boom made 'selling out' itself into an honorific.

Alissa Quart

Parenting makes us better in so many regards.

Alissa Quart

I think teens trust each other's opinions about products because of the quality of authenticity that they think their friend's recommendation has.

Alissa Quart

Civic poetry is public poetry. It is political poetry. It is about the hard stuff of life: money, crime, gender, corporate excess, racial injustice. It gives expression not just to our rites but also to our problems and even our values; these poems are not about rustic vacations.

Alissa Quart

As the world of independent feature filmmaking became increasingly commercialized by the mid-1990s, there was also a parallel, much more positive development: a resurgence in documentary filmmaking, thanks in part to the advent of the cheaper, lighter digital format that helped to offset the daunting costs of pursuing political aims through film.

Alissa Quart