Marie Arana is the prizewinning author of LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority. Among her numerous books are the National Book Award Finalist American Chica, the novels Cellophane and Lima Nights, the biography Bolívar: American Liberator (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and a sweeping history of Latin America Silver, Sword, and Stone, which the American Library Association named the best nonfiction book of 2019. Winner of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature in 2020, Marie has been a former executive at two major publishing houses, a judge for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, a Latin America columnist for the New York Times, a television commentator on books and publishing, and editor in chief of Book World at the Washington Post. She is also the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress.
