Marie Arana is a prizewinning author of eight books, nonfiction and fiction. Winner of an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature in 2020, she has been a former executive at two major publishing houses, a judge for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, a guest columnist on Latin America for the New York Times, a television commentator on books and publishing, and editor in chief of Book World at the Washington Post. She is also the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress. Marie is most recently the author of “LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority,” chosen by the New Yorker as one of the 12 Must Read Books of the Year. Among her other books are the National Book Award Finalist “American Chica,” the novels “Cellophane” and “Lima Nights,” the biography “Bolívar: American Liberator” (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and a sweeping history of Latin America “Silver, Sword, and Stone,” which the American Library Association named the best nonfiction book of 2019. She currently serves on the boards of PEN America, the Authors Guild, the American Writers Museum, the Amazon Conservation Association, the Library of Congress’s Madison Council, and the Northwestern University Libraries; and she has also served on the advisory council of the United States Southern Command. She is president of the 152-year-old Literary Society of Washington. In 2024, at an awards ceremony at the Organization of American States (OAS), she received the Distinguished Leadership for the Americas Award.
