Latina Journalist Visits

GAMBIER, Ohio (January 18, 2009) An accomplished Mexican author and freelance journalist with expertise in Latin American affairs visits Kenyon for lectures on January 21 and 22.

Alma Guillermoprieto is a MacArthur Fellow who has worked for the Washington Post and Newsweek, as the magazine's South America bureau chief. She has contributed to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. She is the author of Samba: The Making of Brazilian Carnival and Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution. Samba recounts her experiences in a samba school preparing for a Brazilian carnival parade. Dancing with Cuba is an account of her time as a dance instructor at the Cuban National School of Dance.

Guillermoprieto has written about violence in El Salvador, the Colombian civil war, the Shining Path conflict in Peru, and the aftermath of the "Dirty War" in Argentina.

At Kenyon, she will address "The New Narcoculture in Mexico" at 7:30 p.m. on January 21 in Higley Auditorium and will discuss Samba during Common Hour (11:10 a.m.) on January 22 in Peirce Lounge.

In a 2005 interview with Robert Birnbaum, editor-at-large of the literary Web site www.identitytheory.com, Guillermoprieto was asked about revealing so much of herself in a memoir, and she responded, "I really wonder about myself, 'Why the hell did I do that since I am a deeply private person? Why did I do this?' And I tried to go around the various sides of it, but in the end, for a narrator, story will win out. If you have a story to tell, you tell it."