Thanks for visiting my site.
I’m the author of Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press, 2004) and co-editor of an anthology of memoirs about growing up in the American working class, Coming of Age in a Hardscrabble World (University of Georgia Press, 2019). I’m a Contributing Editor for Archaeology and a frequent contributor to The Times Literary Supplement. My work has appeared in National Geographic, The Guardian, Mother Jones, The New York Times, ARTnews, and Scientific American, as well as numerous scholarly and literary journals.
I am a journalist by profession but academic bona fides matter, so here are mine, in reverse chronological order: MA in History from Georgetown University, Masters in International Public Policy from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, BA in History from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa).
I was a reporter and editor for Reuters from 1986 to 2002, most of that time in Latin America including as its bureau chief in Chile and as an editor in New York, Washington and (in a return engagement in 2011-13) London. I’ve had a few fellowships: an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, a Knight International Press Fellowship, and a reporting fellowship with the National Science Foundation in Antarctica. I love teaching, and I taught writing and journalism as an adjunct at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and at the University of the District of Columbia, the public university of Washington, DC.
Lately I’ve been working on a study of culture in El Salvador during the Cold War, focused on the life of the great poet Roque Dalton, whom I first read as an undergraduate and have never been able to shake. Parts of this study have appeared in Latin American Research Review, the Salvadoran journal Realidad, and El Faro. I’ve got a book coming out on this topic in 2024 from Editorial Universitaria, the book publishing unit of the national University of El Salvador — stay tuned on that. I wrote the introduction to a terrific British bilingual edition of Dalton’s poetry. If you’d like to read Dalton in translation, this is a great place to start.
As an independent writer, I’ve written hundreds of articles, reviews and essays from about 25 countries. A selection of them are on this site. I was born in Boston, USA, and, after many years living outside the United States, am currently based in Washington, DC.
I work as a consultant at the World Bank-IFC. The picture above is in Parque Cuscatlán, San Salvador, one of my favorite spots.