Silvana Paternostro

Silvana Paternostro is a journalist who has written extensively on Cuba and Central and South America. She specializes in women’s issues, and has also written comprehensively about AIDS, revolutionary movements, underground economies and the intersection of literature, music and other cultural forms with politics and economics.

She is the author of "In the Land of God and Man: Confronting Our Sexual Culture", which explores gender roles and the effect of government and religion on women’s lives in Latin America. It was nominated for the PEN/Martha Abrams Award for First Nonfiction. Her exposé of re-virginization centers in the US appeared the book "Se Habla Español: Voces Latinas en USA", the first anthology of new Latino voices in the United States published in Spanish.

She is a Contributing Editor of Bomb magazine, New York’s leading cultural magazine focusing on interviews between artists, writers, actors, directors, and musicians; and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, The Paris Review, The New Republic and numerous other publications. Her work is frequently translated and re-printed, especially in Latin America. In 1999 she was selected by Time/CNN as one of 50 Latin American Leaders for the New Millennium.

Currently, she is at work on her second book, "My Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind", which mixes memoir with history and reportage to tell the story of Colombia’s 40-year old civil war and uncover the truth about US involvement in the country. It will be published by Henry Holt in September 2007.

She is Associate Producer on "The Argentine" and "Guerrilla", a two part movie based on the life of Che Guevara, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Benicio del Toro. The movie starts to shoot in July 2007.