Keynote Speaker

Sunday, July 26

Alma Guillermoprieto, Latin American correspondent for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, is widely acclaimed for her incisive grasp of the mysterious mixture of culture and politics that shape the region. Guillermoprieto, who has written about Latin America for more than 20 years, was born in Mexico. She covered the insurrection against Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua for The Guardian. She broke the story of the massacre at El Mozote for The Washington Post. For The New Yorker, she wrote about the connection between politics and garbage in Mexico and about the bonds that link Brazilians to the heroes of their telenovelas, among other topics. In The New York Review she has written extensively about the work of Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and of Mexico’s subcomandante Marcos, and about current events in Cuba.

Guillermoprieto's book Samba,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 and Looking for History are collections of her essays from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Her latest book, Dancing With Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution, is a vividly-painted portrait of herself as a young dancer growing disillusioned with the broken promises of the Revolution. Guillermoprieto received 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. In 1995, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.