Marie Arana

Peruvian-American author, editor, journalist, literary critic, and member of the Scholars Council at the Library of Congress. She began her career in book publishing, where she was vice president and senior editor at Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster. For more than a decade she was the editor in chief of "Book World", the book review section of The Washington Post, during which time she instituted the partnership of The Washington Post with the White House (First Lady Laura Bush) and the Library of Congress (Dr. James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress) in hosting the annual National Book Festival on the Washington Mall. Marie Arana is the author of a memoir about a bicultural childhood American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood (finalist for the 2001 National Book Award); editor of a collection of Washington Post essays about the writer's craft, The Writing Life (2002); and the author of Cellophane (a 2006 satirical novel set in the Peruvian Amazon). Arana's most recent book is Bolívar: American Liberator, a 2013 biography of the South American revolutionary leader and founder Simon Bolivar. It won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography. Link to Wikipedia biography