Profile

Susan is Research Director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School (CHHIRJ). She is also co-director of the documentation and strategic organizing project One Nation Indivisible (www.onenationindivisible.org), which is a joint project of CHHIRJ and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council. She has lectured about, studied and written about schooling, inequality and immigration for more than two decades as a journalist, scholar and activist. Most recently, as co-director of One Nation Indivisible, Susan’s work has centered around identifying, understanding and advancing alternatives to segregation and marginalization within schools, neighborhoods, social institutions and in policies and programming related to immigration. She is author, most recently, of The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial (Algonquin, 2007), a narrative book that interweaves the stories of a contemporary civil rights case and an urban classroom in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2008, this book was one of three finalists for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. She is also author of The Other Boston Busing Story: What’s Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line (Yale, 2001), which explores the adult lives of African-Americans who’d participated in a voluntary, urban-to-suburban school desegregation program as children. With Gary Orfield, she is co-author of Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education (New Press, 1996). Her writing has appeared in numerous popular and scholarly publications, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poverty & Race, Harvard Law and Policy Review and Education Week. Previously, Susan was a staff reporter at daily newspapers in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where she won several awards for her writing about public education.