Silvana Paternostro is a Colombian-born author and journalist who has written extensively on Latin America, particularly on women's issues, transnational organized crime, corruption, and civil conflicts. Her countries of expertise are Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, Financial Times and others.
She is the author of In the Land of God and Man: Confronting Our Sexual Culture, a ground-breaking book about machismo in Latin America and in Latino United States. Published in 1997, it was nominated for the PEN/Martha Abrams Award for First Nonfiction. In 1999 she was selected by Time/CNN as one of 50 Latin American Leaders for the New Millennium.
Her second book, My Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind, mixes memoir with history and reportage to tell the story of Colombia’s 40-year-old civil war and U.S. involvement in the country. It was published by Henry Holt in September 2007.
In 2019, she published Solitude & Company, an oral history of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Foreign rights have been acquired in Brazil, India, Russia, Serbia, Poland and China.
She was associate producer on “Che: The Argentine” and “Che: Guerrilla,” a two-part movie based on the life of Che Guevara, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Benicio del Toro. The movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008.
She was a fellow at New America in 1999.