Amy Wilentz is the author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, Martyrs’ Crossing (a novel), and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger.  She has won the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award.  In 1990, she was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  She writes for The New Yorker and The Nation and teaches in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine.  In addition, she has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Time, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Harper’s, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, The London Review of Books and many other publications.  She lives in Los Angeles.

The history of U.S.-Haiti relations is paved with good intentions. Amy Wilentz on Obama’s opportunity—and the legacy he’ll need to overcome.