Amy Wilentz

Amy Wilentz is an American journalist and writer. She is a Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches in the Literary Journalism program. Wilentz was Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, and is a contributing editor at The Nation.

Wilentz was raised in Perth Amboy, New Jersey and New York City, U.S. She is the daughter of Robert N. Wilentz and Jacqueline Malino Wilentz. Her father was Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court from 1979 to 1996; her mother was a painter. She is the granddaughter of David T. Wilentz who was the Attorney General of New Jersey from 1934 to 1944.

She attended Harvard for undergraduate study in 1976, and spent a year after graduation on a Harvard/Radcliffe fellowship at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France.

Wilentz's first jobs in journalism were for The Nation, Newsday, and Time. She also worked for Ben Sonnenberg's literary periodical Grand Street, in its first years. She has followed events in Haiti for many years, from the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 through to the 2010 earthquake and the death of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 2014.

Her works have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Time, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Harper's, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure, San Francisco Chronicle, More, The Village Voice, The London Review of Books, and The Huffington Post.

Wilentz is married to Nicholas Goldberg, opinion editor of The Los Angeles Times.

• 1990 Whiting Award
• 1990 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction for The Rainy Season
• 2000 Rosenthal Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters for Martyrs' Crossing
• 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award, nominee
• 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography), winner for Farewell, Fred Voodoo

• Kirsten Reach (January 14, 2014). "NBCC finalists announced". Melville House Publishing. Retrieved January 14, 2014. 
• "Announcing the National Book Critics Awards Finalists for Publishing Year 2013". National Book Critics Circle. January 14, 2014. Retrieved January 14, 2014. 
• "National Book Critics Circle Announces Award Winners for Publishing Year 2013". National Book Critics Circle. March 13, 2014. Retrieved March 13, 2014. 

Books

• Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-451-64397-8. 
• I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger. Simon and Schuster. 2006. ISBN 978-0-7432-6439-6. 
• Martyrs' Crossing. Simon & Schuster. 2001. ISBN 978-0-684-85436-6. 
• The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier. Simon and Schuster. 1989. ISBN 978-0-671-64186-3. 

Anthologies

• Richard Stengel, ed. (2010). Haiti: Tragedy and Hope. Contributor Amy Wilentz. TIME Books. ISBN 978-1-60320-163-6. 
• Susan Morrison, ed. (2008). Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers. Contributor Amy Wilentz. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-145593-3. 
• Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1990). In the parish of the poor: writings from Haiti. Translator Amy Wilentz. Orbis Books. ISBN 978-0-88344-682-9. 
• Anne Fuller, Amy Wilentz (1991). Return to the Darkest Days: Human Rights in Haiti Since the Coup. Human Rights Watch. ISBN 978-1-56432-054-4.  CS1 maint: Uses authors parameter (link)

• Ben Fountain (January 18, 2013). "A World of Its Own 'Farewell, Fred Voodoo,' by Amy Wilentz". The New York Times. “There’s always hope, whatever that means,” Wilentz sarcastically comments as she deconstructs a coffee-table book of earthquake photos. Hope’s not a given, not in a place as hard as Haiti. Hope is a grind. Hope is a work in progress, emphasis on work. For hope to be real, for it to be more than a feel-good cliché, it has to be earned. That is just one of the many valuable lessons to be found in this intimate, honest, bracingly unsentimental book.