Anna Louie Sussman was born and raised in New York, in what is now called “the Meatpacking District” but in the 1980s was an actual meatpacking district. She has written about a range of topics from sex work to “slow fashion,” and is probably one of the few people on earth to have interned at both Vogue and Human Rights Watch.
One consistent focus of her work as been gender and women. She has written about activists using arguments from the Quran to promote family planning in Yemen, the Turkish government’s steady rollback of women’s rights, and how sex workers are being impacted by the twin forces of social conservatism and urban development. In 2014, she researched and helped write “Fast Forward,” with Melanne Verveer, the first U.S. Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues, and Kim Azzarelli. The book, with a foreword by Hillary Clinton, makes the business and moral case for empowering women and accelerating their rise in the economy.
She’s written for The Wall Street Journal about the much-hyped “gig economy” makes up just a tiny part of the gigantic U.S. labor market, and about that time the Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA made an album about science, with a hand from Neil deGrasse Tyson.
She received her BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University, an MSc Human Rights from the London School of Economics, and an MA in Business and Economics Reporting from New York University. Along the way, she lived in and traveled to several dozen countries, with extensive time spent in Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Damascus, Tunis, Rabat, Rio, London, and Washington, D.C.
She is available for print, radio, TV production, editing, and speechwriting, and brings expertise in human rights and gender and women’s issues, arts and cultural reporting, travel, architecture and design writing, and food. Her freelance work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Salon, The Guardian, The Nation, National Geographic Traveler, T magazine, Departures, Portfolio, and other print and web outlets.