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. She 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 was the 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. She 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 is the granddaughter of David T. Wilentz who was the attorney general of New Jersey from 1934 to 1944, best known for prosecuting Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh kidnapping trial. She attended Harvard for undergraduate study in 1976, where she lived with roommate Jill Abramson in Mather House and 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 first years. She has followed events in Haiti for many years, from the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 through 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, 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 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award, General Nonfiction finalist 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography/Memoir), winner for Farewell, Fred Voodoo 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction Works Books Anthologies Robert Maguire and Scott Freeman, ed. (2017). Who Owns Haiti?: People, Power, and Sovereignty. Contributor Amy Wilentz. University Press of Florida. . The Nation's 150th Anniversary Special Issue (2015). Contributor Amy Wilentz: "The Future of a Failed State". Jeff