Yountville Community Center
11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Join us for an insightful conversation with Sam Quinones, acclaimed journalist and bestselling author of The Least of Us and Dreamland. Sam will share his powerful perspectives on the opioid crisis and the rise of synthetic drugs like fentanyl. A discussion and Q&A session will follow. Hosted by the Michael Leonardi Foundation.
This event is a must-attend for parents, students, educators, and anyone concerned about the fentanyl crisis.
Admission is free, but space is limited! Please reserve your spot here.
Light refreshments will be served.
Sam Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and author of four books of narrative nonfiction. His latest book is The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth.
In The Least of Us (published November 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. The Least of Us was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) award for Best Nonfiction Book of 2021.
The Least of Us follows his landmark Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury, 2015), which ignited awareness of the epidemic that has cost the United States hundreds of thousands of lives, and became the deadliest drug scourge in the nation’s history.
Dreamland 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, Slate.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 2019, Dreamland was selected as one the Best 10 True-Crime Books of all time based on lists, surveys, and ratings of more than 90 million Goodread readers. In 2021, GQ Magazine selected Dreamland as one of the “50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century”.
A Young Adult version of Dreamland was released in July of 2019.
His first two highly acclaimed books grew from his 10 years living and working as a freelance writer in Mexico (1994-2004).
True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx was released in 2001. It is a cult classic of a book from Mexico’s vital margins – stories of drag queens and Oaxacan Indian basketball players, popsicle makers and telenovela stars, migrants, farm workers, a narcosaint, a slain drug balladeer, a slum boss, and a doomed tough guy.
In 2007, he came out with Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. In it, Quinones narrates the saga of the Henry Ford of Velvet Painting, and of how an opera scene emerged in Tijuana, and how a Zacatecan taco empire formed in Chicago. He tells the tale of the Tomato King, of a high-school soccer season in Kansas, and of Mexican corruption in a small LA County town. Threading through the book are three tales of a modern Mexican Huck Finn. Quinones ends the collection in a chapter called "Leaving Mexico" with his harrowing tangle with the Narco-Mennonites of Chihuahua.
Sam Quinones is formerly a reporter with the L.A. Times, where he worked for 10 years (2004-2014). He is a veteran reporter on immigration, gangs, drug trafficking, the border.
For sponosorship opportunities, please email info@michaelleonardifoundation.org.
The Michael Leonardi Foundation is funded in part by Napa County Health and Human Services Agency (HHSA) through Opioid Settlement Funds (OSF) to support prevention, intervention, treatment, recovery, and other life-saving programs and services for individuals and families throughout the community.