Anna Louie Sussman is a New York-based journalist with extensive experience reporting on gender, economics, health, and reproduction. She is currently at work on the book “Inconceivable: Reproduction in an Age of Uncertainty,” which looks at the challenges people face in starting and growing their families. It builds off her New York Times Sunday Review cover story, “The End of Babies.”
Her first published story, an engrossing account of the hunt for the perfect prom dress, appeared in Teen Vogue circa 1999. A decade later, she was reporting from the Middle East on women’s lives, and in 2011, became the senior writer and editor of Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s Women in the World Foundation.
Since then, she has reported extensively on finance and the economy, covering the shipping and energy industries for Reuters, and economics and the labor market for The Wall Street Journal. She researched and helped write “Fast Forward,” a book on how to advance women and girls in the global economy, with a foreword by Hillary Clinton.
She has interviewed Thomas Piketty about income inequality, heard a Yemeni imam justify contraceptive use with Quranic citations, and gotten Jeff Koons to explain why artists should embrace the market. She has reported on Polish women who can’t access their own frozen embryos, how abortion politics and the gruesome history of medical experimentation conspired to exclude pregnant people from clinical trials, and the brutal economics of egg freezing.
She has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, residencies, and awards, including from the Logan Nonfiction Program, MacDowell, the Fetisov Journalism Awards, the Hambidge Center, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and others. She was a member of the 2022 Class of New America Fellows, and is currently a 2024 Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow.
She has reported from nearly two dozen countries in the Middle East, South America, Europe, Asia, and North America. She lived and worked for five years in the Middle East, logging time in Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Damascus, Tunis, Rabat, and Sana’a. She was born and raised in New York, enjoys reading and sewing, and is the parent of one outrageously wonderful dog, Stewie.