Amy Wilentz, UC Irvine professor of English and literary journalism, has won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her autobiography Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, a gritty memoir based on years of reporting from Haiti. The 2013 awards were presented in a ceremony Thursday, March 13, at The New School in New York. Winners were chosen by the nearly 600 critics and editors who make up the NBCC. Wilentz’s latest book has been called “an extraordinarily frank cultural study/memoir that eschews platitudes of both tragedy and hope” by Kirkus Reviews and “intimate, honest, bracingly unsentimental” by The New York Times Book Review. Wilentz has also received the Whiting Writers’ Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and the American Academy of Arts & Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction. She has written for numerous magazines and is a longtime contributing editor at The Nation.