Amy Wilentz

Picture of Amy Wilentz
Professor of English
School of Humanities

Phone: (949) 824-3745
Fax: (949) 824-2916
Email: awilentz@uci.edu
University of California, Irvine
410 Humanities Instructional Building
Mail Code: 2650
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
Formal mechanisms of literary journalism; travel journalism as a literary form; Explanatory journalism; role of journalism for the everyday reader
Academic Distinctions
National Book Critics Circle award, 2013, for Farewell, Fred Voodoo
Research Abstract
Amy Wilentz is the author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (1989), Martyrs' Crossing (2000), and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger (2006). She edited and translated The Parish of the Poor (Orbis Books 1990), a collection of the writings of Haitian President and political leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide. She contributed the leading essay to the book Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary (Harper, 2008), as well as an essay, "Sugarland," to the collection Eating Mudcrabs in Kandahar: Stories of Food During Wartime by the World's Leading Correspondents (Matt McAllester, ed., University of California Press). Wilentz is the winner of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle award, the 1990 Whiting Writers Award, the 1990 PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the 2001 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, and was also a 1990 nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles, Time magazine, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Harper’s, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, Reconstruction, Travel & Leisure, The San Francisco Chronicle, More, The Village Voice, The London Review of Books and many other publications. She is the former Jerusalem correspondent of The New Yorker and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation.
Publications
Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, 2013, Simon & Schuster
At work on a novel; working title: Play Possum

Running in the Ruins, The New Yorker, September 4, 2010

The Rainy Season: Haiti -Then and Now, Simon & Schuster, reissue with new introduction, April, 2010

Love and Haiti, Conde Nast Traveler, September, 2009

Mr. Los Angeles: Samuel Johnson, Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2009

Suddenly Susan, Los Angeles Times, April, 2009

Married to the Candidate, review of Michelle, Washington Post, October 5, 2008

Who's Afraid of Jimmy Carter, New York Magazine, July 28, 2008

Provence Profound, New York Times, May 18, 2008

When the Hills are Burning, Washington Post October 25, 2007
Last updated
03/24/2014