Marcela Valdes is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine who specializes in Latino and Latin American politics and culture. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Nation<.em>, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, Bookforum<.em>, and NPR.org, among other publications. In 2010 she received a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism from Harvard University and the Roger Shattuck Award for Criticism from the Center for Fiction.