Anya Kamenetz (born September 15, 1980 in Baltimore) is an American writer living in Brooklyn, New York City. She is a staff writer for Fast Company magazine and a columnist for Tribune Media . During 2005 she wrote a column for The Village Voice called "Generation Debt: The New Economics of Being Young". Her first book, Generation Debt, was published by Riverhead Books in February 2006. Her writing has also appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, The Nation, the The Forward newspaper, and Vegetarian Times.
In 2009 Kamenetz wrote a column called "How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education"[1] and in 2010 a book on the subject titled DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. In 2010 she was named a Game Changer in Education by the Huffington Post.
She is the daughter of Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and other books on spirituality, and Moira Crone, fiction writer and author of Dream State and A Period of Confinement. Kamenetz grew up in Baton Rouge and New Orleans and graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School and Yale College in 2002.[2]
Generation Debt argues that student loans, credit card debt, the changing job market, and fiscal irresponsibility imperil the future economic prospects of the current generation, which is the first American generation not to do better financially than their parents.[3]
Some critics of Generation Debt have held that Kamenetz is not critical enough of her own perspective. A writer at Slate wrote, "it's not that the author misdiagnose[s] ills that affect our society. It's just that [she] lack[s] the perspective to add any great insight."[4]