Amy Wilentz is an American journalist and writer. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches Literary Journalism. Wilentz received a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, as well as a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction. Wilentz is The New Yorker 's former Jerusalem correspondent and is a contributing editor at The Nation.

Early life and education

Wilentz is the daughter of Robert 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 was raised in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Wilentz is also the granddaughter of David T. Wilentz, the New Jersey attorney general from 1934 to 1944, best known for prosecuting Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh kidnapping tria l. She attended Harvard for undergraduate study in 1976, where she wrote for The Harvard Crimson. She 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 early years. Wilentz has covered events in Haiti for many years, from the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 through the 2010 earthquake and Duvalier's death in 2014. Her work has 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, The Village Voice, The London Review of Books, The Huffington Post, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas , and The Spectator. Wilentz is the author of two books on Haiti, The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (1989) and Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti (2013). She is the translator of In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti, by Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991). She continues to write frequently about Haiti, most often for The Nation. Martyrs’ Crossing, Wilentz's novel about the Oslo peace process in Jerusalem in the mid-1990s, was published in 2000. Her memoir, I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger was published in 2006.

Personal life

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

Awards

Works

Books

Anthologies