Alma Guillermoprieto

Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto may be the most internationally recognized Latin American reporter. From 1978 to 1984, she covered wars in Central America for The Guardian and The Washington Post. Alongside Raymond Bonner from the New York Times, she told the story of the El Mozote massacre, the largest massacre of the 20th century in Latin American history. Later, she was Newsweek’s head correspondent for South America. As the author of several articles for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and National Geographic, she has become an obligatory point of reference for those interested in Latin America. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for her command of language and the literary quality of her texts, and was a member of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language’s fourth edition advisory council.

The many prizes and honors she has received include a MacArthur Grant (1995), the Cátedra Julio Cortázar (2008), the International Women’s Media Foundation Life and Work awards (2010), El País’s Fundación Ortega y Gasset prize (2017), and the George Polk Awards Foundation (2024). In 2018, she received the Humanities Prize from the Princesa de Asturias Foundation.

Alma Guillermoprieto is the author of La Habana en un Espejo (Random House/Mondadori, translated as Dancing with Cuba); Looking for History (Vintage, 2001); The Heart that Bleeds (Knopf, 1994), these last two compilations of her texts for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books; Samba (Knopf, 1991), a chronicle of the year she spent alongside the residents of the Mangueira favela, creators of Rio de Janeiro’s most traditional carnaval parade; and Será que soy feminista (Random House, 2020). Various compliations of her texts have been published, including Desde el país de nunca jamás with Random House’s Debate imprint and Los placeres y los días (Almadía, 2015).

She has been an invited professor in the History department at Harvard, University of Chicago, University of California, and Princeton. She inaugurated Harvard’s Humanities Fellowships in 2007. In 1995, she was invited by Gabriel García Márquez to direct the inaugural Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI) workshop, and she led one of the foundation’s most emblematic workshops for years. Among her non-journalistic projects is the virtual altar erected in collaboration with 71 other Mexican writers to commemorate the 72 migrants who were murdered near the United States border in August of 2010.