Amy Wilentz

Amy Wilentz
File:Amy wilentz 9050054.jpg
Occupation	Writer, journalist
Language	English
Nationality	American
Notable works	Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger
Spouse	Nicholas Goldberg
Relatives	David T. Wilentz (grandfather)

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.

Early life and education

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.

Career

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, The San Francisco Chronicle, More, The Village Voice, The London Review of Books, and The Huffington Post.

Personal life

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

Awards

• 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

External links

• Author's website
• Faculty page at UC Irvine
• Profile at The Whiting Foundation
• "Review: MARTYRS' CROSSING", Book Reporter