Francisco Macias from the Library of Congress speaks with Marie Arana, who will appear at the 2013 National Book Festival on September 21, 2013, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Biography

The daughter of a Peruvian father and an American mother, Marie Arana was born in Lima, Peru, and when she was 9, she moved to New Jersey. Arana is a former editor of The Washington Post’s Book World and is now a writer-at-large for that newspaper. Arana’s memoir, “American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood,” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. Arana has recently turned to biography with “Bolívar: American Liberator,” which The Washington Post described as “magisterial in scope, written with flair and an almost cinematic sense of history happening.”