by Andrew Moreno
Sam Quinones, LA Times Journalist and author of three acclaimed books of nonfiction, will be reading and signing books at Showalter Auditorium on the EWU Cheney campus this Thursday (2/11) from 3-5 pm. to close the EWU Colloquium on Mexico. The San Francisco Chronicle has called Quinones “the most original writer on Mexico and the border out there,” while the Los Angeles Times says, “Over the last 15 years he has filed the best dispatches about Mexican migration and its effects on the United States bar none.”
From 2004-2014, Quinones reported for the LA Times on immigration, drugs, and gangs. His first two books, True Tales from Another Mexico and Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream are collections of nonfiction stories about Mexico and Mexican immigration to the U.S. Quinones’ most recent work, however, has a different focus.
Dreamland: The True Tales of America’s Opiate Epidemic examines how Purdue Pharma’s 1990s marketing campaign for the expensive— and extremely addictive— opioid painkiller Oxycotin contributed to our country’s current heroin epidemic. In the book, Quinones profiles people from all walks of life— pharma pioneers, young Mexican entrepreneurs, narcotics investigators, survivors, and parents—and shows how one of the biggest public health disasters of our time came about. Dreamland was named a Best Book of the 2015 by The Daily Beast, The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, and a number of other publications. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Publishers Weekly called it “Fascinating . . . a harrowing, eye-opening look at two sides of the same coin, the legal and illegal faces of addictive painkillers and their insidious power.”
More info in the EWU Colloquium on Mexico can be found here, but to me as a writing student, the Quinones reading is what stands out to me. It’s free to anyone who has the time and inclination to make it out to Cheney, and worth the trip to hear an expert storyteller-journalist cover the topics he’s spent his career getting to know so well.
Again: Sam Quinones will be reading this Thursday, February 11, at Showalter Auditorium in Cheney from 3-5 p.m. to close EWU’s Colloquium on Mexico.
