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Anya Kamenetz speaks, writes, and thinks about thriving and caring for others on a rapidly changing planet. Her newsletter on these topics is The Golden Hour. She covered education for many years including for NPR, where she co-created the podcast Life Kit: Parenting. Her last book was The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, And Where We Go Now. Kamenetz is currently an advisor to the Aspen Institute and the Climate Mental Health Network, working on new initiatives at the intersection of children, well-being, education, and climate change. Her next book, forthcoming from Bloomsbury, is about how to cope with the world right now.
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Anya Kamenetz speaks, writes, and thinks about thriving and caring for others on a rapidly changing planet. Her newsletter on these topics is The Golden Hour. She covered education for many years including for NPR, where she also co-created the podcast Life Kit: Parenting in partnership with Sesame Workshop. Kamenetz is currently an advisor to the Aspen Institute and the Climate Mental Health Network.
She’s the author of several acclaimed nonfiction books: Generation Debt (Riverhead, 2006); DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (Chelsea Green, 2010) ; The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed With Standardized Testing, But You Don’t Have To Be (Public Affairs, 2016); The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life (Public Affairs, 2018), and The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, And Where We Go Now (Public Affairs, 2022). Her next book, forthcoming from Bloomsbury, explores the state of our emotional lives in the face of the ongoing polycrisis and how we can find calm, hope and joy in the moment while dealing with the very tough things happening now and expected in the future.
Kamenetz was named a 2010 Game Changer in Education by the Huffington Post, received 2009, 2010, and 2015 National Awards for Education Reporting from the Education Writers Association, won an Edward R. Murrow Award for innovation in 2017 along with the rest of the NPR Ed team, and the 2022 AERA Excellence in Media Reporting on Education Research Award. She’s been a New America fellow, a staff writer for Fast Company Magazine and a columnist for the Village Voice. She’s contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Grist, Orion, and been featured in documentaries shown on PBS, CNN, HBO and Vice. She frequently speaks, teaches and consults on topics related to children, parenting, learning, technology, and climate to audiences including at Google, Apple, and Sesame, Aspen Ideas, SXSW, TEDx, The New York Climate Exchange, New York Climate Week, Yale, MIT and Stanford. She’s on several boards and advisory boards.
Kamenetz grew up in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana, in a family of writers and mystics, and graduated from Yale University. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.