Marie Arana


Marie Arana is a Peruvian American author, editor, journalist, critic, and the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress.

Personal life

Marie Arana was born in Lima, Peru, the daughter of Jorge Enrique Arana Cisneros, a Peruvian-born civil engineer, and Marie Elverine Clapp Campbell, an American from Kansas and Boston, whose family has deep roots in the United States. She moved with her parents to Summit, New Jersey, at the age of nine. She earned a B.A. in Russian at Northwestern University, an M.A. in linguistics at Hong Kong University, and a certificate of scholarship at Yale University in China. At Northwestern she joined Delta Gamma and was honored as Homecoming Queen. She began her career in book publishing, becoming vice president and senior editor at Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster.
She has sometimes been credited as Marie Arana-Ward.

Career

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 First Lady Laura Bush and the Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, in hosting the annual National Book Festival on the Washington Mall. Arana claimed to be the only Hispanic division head of the newspaper at this time. for many years, directed all programming for the National Book Festival among numerous other programs at the Library. and most recently has been the Literary Director of the Library of Congress. Arana is a Writer at Large for The Washington Post. She is married to Jonathan Yardley, the Posts former chief book critic, and has two children from a previous marriage and two stepchildren.
Arana is the author of a memoir about a bicultural childhood American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood ; editor of a collection of Washington Post essays about the writer's craft, The Writing Life ; and the author of Cellophane. Her most recent novel, published in January 2009, is Lima Nights. The Spanish edition of Bolívar: Libertador Americano was published the same year by Penguin Random House.
In October 2019, Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, named her Literary Director of the Library of Congress.
Bolivar and Silver, Sword and Stone have received accusations of hispanophobia, antiespañolismo, stereotyping, sectarianism and misinformation.
In May 2020, Arana was awarded the 2020 Arts and Literature Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which cited her accumulated work as “vivid and elegantly argued writing about Latin America... that shows us the dire effects of countries that have not ceased to be colonized for hundreds of years. Arana’s treatment of these sustained attacks is compelling and undeniable.”
In March 2021, the Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden conferred on her the Library of Congress Award for Superior Service.
Arana's eighth book LatinoLand was published on February 20th, 2024. The Washington Post wrote that, "Her fragmented and beautifully written narrative, which washes over readers in a series of portraits, rather than as one continuous story, is a perfect representation of Latino diversity". The New York Times noted that the book had a very fast pace as it covered an expansive history. The New Yorker called “LatinoLand” one of the 12 Must-Read books of 2024.
Arana is the creator and Senior Executive Producer of the nationally broadcast primetime television show about authors, America’s Book Club, which is hosted by cultural leader and patron David Rubenstein and airs weekly on C-SPAN.

Awards and honors

Honorary posts

Selected works

  • Bolivar: American Liberator, Simon & Schuster, 2013,
  • Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story, Simon & Schuster, 2019,
  • LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority, Simon & Schuster, 2024

Editor

  • The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work: A Collection from the Washington Post Book World, editor, PublicAffairs, 2002,
  • Stone Offerings: Machu Picchu's Terraces of Enlightenment, photographs by Mike Torrey, Introduction by Marie Arana, Lightpoint, 2009