Join JOY RADIO  on October 24 at 11 am, ET as we continue to support Words & Music… A Literary Feast in New Orleans – Nov. 28 – Dec. 2, interviewing Marie Arana.

Marie Arana—novelist, non-fiction author, and Writer-At-Large for The Washington Post—was born in Peru, moved to the United States at the age of nine. Prior to joining the Washington Post in 1993, she was Vice President and Senior Editor at both Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster. She began with the Washington Post as Deputy Editor of “Book World,” was promoted to Editor in Chief, a position she held for ten years. Currently, she is a Writer at Large and a Senior Consultant at the Library of Congress. Arana is the author of a memoir about her bicultural childhood, American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award as well as the PEN/Memoir Award, and won the Books for a Better Life Award. She is the editor of a collection of Washington Post essays about the writer’s craft, The Writing Life: How Writers Think and Work (2002), which is used as a textbook for writing courses in universities across the country. Her novel Cellophane, set in the Peruvian Amazon, was published in 2006 and selected as a finalist for the John Sargent Prize. Her most recent novel, also set in Peru is Lima Nights. She has written the introductions for many books on Latin America, Hispanicity and biculturalism. She is the scriptwriter for the South American portion of 10 x 10, a full-length feature film on the importance of girls’ education, which will be released in Spring, 2013. Her latest book, a biography of Simón Bolívar, will be published by Simon & Schuster in April 2013. She is married to Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley.

http://mariearana.net/