Marie Arana is the prizewinning author of LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Among her numerous books are the National Book Award finalist American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood (Dial Press, 2001); the novels Cellophane (Knopf, 2006) and Lima Nights (Knopf, 2008); the biography Bolívar: American Liberator (Simon & Schuster, 2013), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and the sweeping history of Latin America Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles of the Latin American Story (Simon & Schuster, 2019), which the American Library Association named the best nonfiction book of 2019.

Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature in 2020, Arana has been a senior executive at two major publishing houses, a judge for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, a Latin America Columnist 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.

Arana currently serves on the boards of PEN America, PEN/Faulkner, the Authors Guild, the American Writers Museum, the Amazon Conservation Association, and the Library of Congress’s Madison Council. She has also served on the Advisory Council of the United States Southern Command. In 2024, at an awards ceremony at the Organization of American States, she received the Distinguished Leadership for the Americas Award from the Inter-American Dialogue.