Sam Quinones is a journalist, former LA Times reporter, author and storyteller. A reporter for almost 30 years, Quinones lived and worked as a freelance writer in Mexico from 1994 to 2004. He spent time with gang members and governors, taco vendors and Los Tigres del Norte. He wrote about soap operas, and he lived briefly in a drug-rehabilitation clinic in Zamora, while hanging out with a street gang. His previous two acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction about Mexico and Mexican immigration made him, according to the SF Chronicle Book Review, "the most original writer on Mexico and the border." His first book, True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2001) is a collection of nonfiction stories about contemporary Mexico. His second, Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration (UNM Press, 2007) was called "genuinely original work, what great fiction and nonfiction aspire to be, these are the stories that stop time and remind us how great reading is." (S.F. Chronicle). In 1998, he received an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, and Columbia University's Maria Moors Cabot Prize in 2008, for a career of excellence in reporting about Latin America.