Alma Guillermoprieto

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Alma Guillermoprieto, who was born in Mexico, has written about Latin America for more than twenty years. She is a frequent contributor to both the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. Guillermoprieto covered the insurrection against Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua for the Guardian and broke the story of the massacre at El Mozote for the Washington Post.

Guillermoprieto has written four books. Samba (Knopf, 1990), an account of the year she spent with the impoverished carnival-makers of Brazil, was nominated for the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award. The Heart That Bleeds (Knopf, 1994) and Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America (Pantheon, 2001) are collections of her essays from the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Her latest book is Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution (Pantheon, 2004).

She has received a number of awards, including a 1985 Alicia Patterson Fellowship, the 1992 Latin American Studies Association Media Award, and the 2000 George Polk Award for her series on Colombia, first published in the New York Review of Books. In 1995, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. Since 1995, she has conducted the first workshop of the year at the Fundacion Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano in Colombia, which she cofounded. She was a 2004–2005 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.