Daniel Alarcón is a writer and radio producer exploring the social, cultural, and linguistic ties that connect people across Latin America and Spanish-speaking communities in the Americas. His powerful narrative storytelling—in English and Spanish, fiction and nonfiction, print and audio—chronicles individual lives and underreported topics against the backdrop of broader geopolitical and historical forces in the United States and Central and South America.

He received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. He was Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College and an investigative reporting fellow at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 2014 and is currently an associate professor in the School of Journalism. Since 2012, he has served as co-founder and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, and he is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, where he covers Latin America. He is the author of the novels At Night We Walk in Circles and Lost City Radio, short story collections The King is Always Above the People and War by Candlelight, and his writing has appeared in Granta, Harper’s Magazine, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 and the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2021.

This event is supported by an ILA Major Grant.

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