“Secret Reserves,” an essay by Stony Brook University Journalism Professor Pablo Calvi, made the Best American Essays Series 100 Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2015. It was also selected as one of the top 31 Notable Travel Writing pieces of 2015.
The essay is about the Sápara, a people indigenous to the Amazon rainforest along the border of Ecuador and Peru.
In a land as exceptional for its fragile and fiercely guarded biodiversity as for its dwindling population of guardians, the indigenous Sápara are first in line for a new form of extinction. And they are staking the only thing they have left against it — their afterlife.
Calvi is the first non-native, English speaker to receive a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship in the history of the Pulitzer Prizes. He also received the 2010 IALJS Greenberg Research Prize for Literary Journalism and the 2010 CELSA-Sorbonne writing fellowship.
At Stony Brook Calvi teaches courses in multimedia journalism and Latin American literary journalism. He is associate director for Latin America in the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting and is a guest lecturer at the Columbia University/Universitat de Barcelona master’s program.
Read “Secret Reserves” in The Believer, a bimonthly literature, arts and culture magazine.
