photo: Paula Goldman

Amy Wilentz is the author of Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (2013), The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (1990), Martyrs’ Crossing (2000), and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger (2006). She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award. In 1990 she was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction for The Rainy Season. She won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for memoir for Farewell, Fred Voodoo, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in general nonfiction in 2020. Wilentz is MacDowell fellow, the former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation. She is also a contributing editor at The Markaz Review, an online publication about Middle Eastern culture, politics, diaspora, and art. She has written for The New York Times,The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, The London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications. She teaches in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California at Irvine, and lives in Los Angeles.