Alma Guillermoprieto
by Joel Rice
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Mexican-born journalist and memoirist Alma Guillermoprieto often--and deservedly--invites comparisons to masters of the non-fiction such as Joan Didion and Ryszard Kapuscinski. Guillermoprieto, like these luminaries, elevates reportage to poetic and novelistic heights, combining a rigorous love of detail with a probing intellect and acute sense of humanity. Her dispatches from Latin America, many of which appeared in the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books during the 1990s, are stylistically immaculate. Whether her subjects are Colombia's FARC rebels, State Department officials or Eva Peron, she brings breadth and depth of understanding to her often poignant and irony-tinged writings. But it is her precise details that linger: a guerrilla leader's tattered scarf or the chilled drizzle of the Colombian jungle. Guillermoprieto's books include The Heart That Bleeds, Looking for History and Dancing with Cuba.
Tue., Sept. 23, 7 p.m., 2008
Tue., Sept. 23, 7 p.m., 2008
