| Sam Quinones | |
| Birth Place: | Claremont, California, U.S. |
| Education: | University of California, Berkeley |
| Occupation: | Journalist |
| Known For: | Reporter for the Los Angeles Times |
| Notable Works: | Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration; True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic The Virgin of the American Dream "The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth" |
The surname Quinones is of Spanish language origin. In Spanish, it is spelled Quiñones.
Sam Quinones (;) is an American journalist from Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his reporting in Mexico and on Mexicans in the United States, and for his chronicling of the opioid crisis in America through his 2015 book Dreamland, followed by, in 2021, his book, The Least of Us. He has been a reporter for 35 years. He is now a freelance journalist. Prior to that he was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to 2014.[1] [2]
Quinones grew up in Claremont, California.[3] He graduated from Claremont High School in 1977 and then attended the University of California at Berkeley, graduating with B.A. degrees in Economics and American History.[4]
He took his first journalism job in 1987 at the Orange County Register. The next year he moved to Stockton, California, where he spent four years working as a crime reporter for the Stockton Record. In 1992, he moved to Seattle, where he covered county government and politics for the Tacoma News-Tribune.
He left for Mexico in 1994 where he worked as a freelance reporter. Quinones returned to the United States in 2004 to work for the Los Angeles Times, covering immigration-related stories and gangs.[5]
He wrote in November 2012 about efforts to rework the Mexican indigenous governance system known as usos y costumbres (uses and customs), which has become seen as disadvantaging migrants to the United States and pitting them against people who had remained in their villages.[6]
In 2013, he took a leave of absence from the paper to work on his book Dreamland about the opioid epidemic in America, focusing on abuse of prescription painkillers such as Oxycontin and the spread of Mexican black-tar heroin, primarily by men from the town of Xalisco, Nayarit.
Dreamland was selected as one of the Best Books of 2015 by Amazon.com, the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, Seattle Times, Boston Globe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Entertainment Weekly, Audible, and in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Business by Nobel economics laureate, Prof. Angus Deaton, of Princeton University. In 2014, Quinones left the Los Angeles Times to "return to freelancing, writing for National Geographic, Pacific Standard Magazine, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Magazine, and several other publications."[7]
In January 2017, Quinones was interviewed by Sally Wiggin from WTAE Pittsburgh. The two discussed his book Dreamland and the opioid epidemic Pennsylvania and other states are facing in the 21st century.[8]
Writing for the Los Angeles Times in January 2017, Quinones penned an op-ed piece titled, "The Truth is Immigrants have let us live like Princes." In the article, he writes about the positive economic impact of immigrant workers on the Southern Californian region of the United States.[9] [10]
In 1998, he was selected as a recipient of the Alicia Patterson Fellowship, for a series of stories on impunity in Mexican villages. In 2008, he was awarded a Maria Moors Cabot prize, by Columbia University, for a career of excellence in covering Latin America.
In 2011, he started a storytelling experiment, called "Tell Your True Tale" on his website. The site aims to encourage new writers to write their own stories. At last count it had more than 50 stories posted.[18]
In February 2012, Quinones started "True Tales: A Reporter's Blog" about “Los Angeles, Mexico, migrants, culture, drugs, neighborhoods, border, and good storytelling.”[19]
His book Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic was released in hardback in 2015, and a year later in paperback. It won a National Book Critics Circle award for the Best Nonfiction Book of 2015. It was also selected as one of the Best Books of 2015 by Amazon.com, the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, Seattle Times, Boston Globe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Entertainment Weekly, Audible, and in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Business by Nobel economics laureate, Prof. Angus Deaton, of Princeton University.
Following the release of Dreamland in April 2015, Quinones gave 265 speeches about the book and the opioid epidemic over the next four and a half years to small towns, universities, professional conferences of judges, narcotics officers, doctors, public health and social workers, addiction counselors, and many more.
In 2019, Dreamland was selected as one of the Best 10 True-Crime Books of all time based on lists, surveys, and ratings of more than 90 million Goodread.com readers. Also in 2019, Slate.com selected Dreamland as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last 25 years. In 2021, GQ Magazine selected Dreamland as one of the “50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century.”
In The Least of Us (published October 2021), Quinones chronicles the emergence of a drug-trafficking world producing massive supplies of dope cheaper and deadlier than ever, marketing to the population of addicts created by the nation's opioid epidemic, as the backdrop to tales of Americans’ quiet attempts to recover community through simple acts of helping the vulnerable. In 2022, the National Book Critics Circle nominated The Least of Us as one of the best nonfiction books of 2021.
Quinones has lectured a more than 50 universities across the United States. He testified before the U.S. Senate Labor, Education, Health and Pensions committee in January, 2018. In 2012, he gave a lecture at the University of Arizona entitled “So Far from Mexico City, So Close to God: Stories of Mexican Immigrants" and of Mexico's Escape from History.”[20]
Quinones lives in Southern California.