Sam Quinones

Sam Quinones is a long-time journalist and author of 3 books of narrative nonfiction.He worked for the LA Times for 10 years. He spent 10 years before that as a freelance journalist in Mexico.His first book is True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx, published in 2001, a collection of nonfiction stories about drag queens, popsicle-makers, Oaxacan basketball players, telenovela stars, gunmen, migrants, and slain narco-balladeer, Chalino Sanchez.In 2007, he published Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. In this volume he tells stories of the Henry Ford of velvet painting, opera singers in Tijuana, the Tomato King of Jerez, Zacatecas, the stories of a young construction worker heading north, and Quinones' own encounter with the narco-Mennonites of Chihuahua.His third book was released in 2015. Dreamland: the True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic recounts twin tales of drug market in the 21st Century. A pharmaceutical company markets its new painkiller as "virtually nonaddictive" just as heroin traffickers from a small town in Mexico devise a system of selling heroin retail, like pizza. The result is the beginning of America's latest drug scourge, and the resurgence of heroin across the country.The book has received rave reviews in Salon.com, Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, American Conservative, Kirkus Review, and National Public Radio. Amazon readers gave Dreamland 4.7 stars and called it "a masterpiece" and "a thriller." "I couldn't put it down," said one. Said another: "This book tells one of the most important stories of our time."Following Antonio's Gun, the San Francisco Chronicle called Quinones "the most original American writer on Mexico and the border out there."He has done numerous Skype sessions with book groups that have chosen his books to read.Quinones also writes True Tales: A Reporter's Blog, at his website, http://www.samquinones.com.For several years, he has given writing workshops called Tell Your True Tale. Most recently the workshops have taken place at East Los Angeles Public Library, from which have emerged three volumes of true stories by new authors from the community. For more information, go to http://www.colapublib.org/tytt/.