Anna Clark

Anna Clark is the author of Michigan Literary Luminaries, edited A Detroit Anthology, and was a writer-in-residence in Detroit public schools as part of the InsideOut Literary Arts program. Her journalistic writing has appeared in ELLE Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, the Columbia Journalism Review, Next City, and other publications. When the people of Flint, Michigan, turned on their faucets in April 2014, the water pouring out was poisoned with lead and other toxins. The state government had switched the city’s water supply to a source that corroded Flint’s aging lead pipes. But because the residents of Flint, mostly poor and African American, were not seen as credible, even in matters of their own lives, complaints about the water were dismissed. It took eighteen months of activism to force the state to admit that the water was poisonous. By then, twelve people had died and Flint’s children had suffered irreparable harm. The battle for accountability and a humane response to this man-made disaster has only just begun. Anna Clark’s The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy (Picador) recounts the story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It’s about one town, but it could be about any American city, and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal. In a starred review, Booklist praised The Poisoned City as “Incisive and informed […] Clark combines a staggering amount of research and several intimate story lines to reveal how the Michigan city was poisoned by its leaders and then largely abandoned to its fate by state officials.”