Alissa Quart – författare

Generation Y has grown up in an age of the brand, bombarded by name products. In Branded, Alissa Quart illuminates the unsettling new reality of marketing to teenagers, as well as the quieter but no less worrisome forms of teen branding: the teen consultants who work for corporations in exchange for product the girls obsessed with cosmetic surgery who will do anything to look like women on TV and those teens simply obsessed with admission into a name-brand college. We also meet the pockets of kids attempting to turn the tables on the cocksure corporations that so cynically strive to manipulate them. Chilling, thought-provoking, even darkly amusing, Branded brings one of the most disturbing and least talked about results of contemporary business and culture to the fore-and ensures that we will never look at today's youth the same way again.

Republic of Outsiders is a look at the growing number of American outsiders who disrupt the status quo: the outcasts who seek to redefine a wide variety of fields, from film and mental health to music and gender. These people range from professional and amateur filmmakers crowd-sourcing their work, to transgender and autistic activists, and Occupy Wall Street's 'alternative bankers'. They are the groups that have forged a new cultural practice Quart dubs 'identity innovation'; pushing the boundaries of who are they are and what they can achieve.

Republic of Outsiders is a look at the growing number of American outsiders who disrupt the status quo: the outcasts who seek to redefine a wide variety of fields, from film and mental health to music and gender. These people range from professional and amateur filmmakers crowd-sourcing their work, to transgender and autistic activists, and Occupy Wall Street's 'alternative bankers'. They are the groups that have forged a new cultural practice Quart dubs 'identity innovation'; pushing the boundaries of who are they are and what they can achieve.

A collection of compelling, hard-hitting first-person essays, poems, and photos that expose what our punitive social systems do to so many Americans.Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara Ehrenreich, who conceived of EHRP, once described as "the real face of journalism today: not million dollar-a-year anchorpersons, but low-wage workers and downwardly spiraling professionals."One essayist and grocery store worker describes what it is like to be an “essential worker” during the pandemic; another reporter and military veteran details his experience with homelessness and what would have actually helped him at the time. These dozens of fierce and sometimes darkly funny pieces reflect the larger systems that have made writers' bodily experiences, family and home lives, and work far harder than they ought to be.Featuring introductions by luminaries including Michelle Tea, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Astra Taylor, Going for Broke is revelatory. It shows us the costs of income inequality to our bodies and our minds—and demonstrates real ways to change our conditions.

“You walk into Thoughts and Prayers like it’s a familiar pop cultural fun house—then you get drawn into one of the mirrors and find you’re actually deep in someplace very real: fleshy, frightening, full of anguished intelligence and bitter fun.” —Mary GaitskillThoughts and Prayers is a beautiful and startling volume of poetry about our political existence. With both humor and luminosity, it gets at the personal and collective emotional experience of American public life, from the 1970s to the 1990s Democrats, through the collapse of the news industry, to the burlesque Trump era.