Twin Rivers Writers Series: Meet Author John Otis

Enjoy an evening learning about the writing and experiences of author John Otis. John Otis grew up in Mankato where his parents were English professors at MSU. He got his start in journalism at East High School by writing music reviews for the student newspaper. He graduated from Macalester College, interned at the Twin Cities Reader and worked as city hall reporter for a newspaper in upstate New York. He then quite his job and, with limited Spanish, jumped aboard a Greyhound for Mexico.
For the past 35 years John has reported on Latin America for The Houston Chronicle, The Miami Herald, Time Magazine and The Wall Street Journal and is currently the South American correspondent for NPR. He has covered guerrilla wars, drug cartels, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and dictatorships in Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua. He was also sent to Afghanistan and Iraq to cover U.S. military operations in those countries. As a consultant for the Committee to Protect Journalists, John also investigates press censorship, death threats, arrests, and killings of journalists in Latin America.
He is author of the book “Law of the Jungle,” (HarperCollins, 2010) a history of Colombia’s guerrilla war told through the prism of Colombian soldiers who, while searching for American hostages, stumbled upon $20 million buried in the
rainforest.
John has been honored by the Inter American Press Association and the Overseas Press Club of the Americas, and won Columbia University’s 2024 Maria Moors Cabot Gold Medal for distinguished reporting on Latin America. He lives in Bogotá with his wife, a Colombian journalist, and their two sons.
UNDERWRITTEN BY:
BRYAN AND TAMI PAULSEN and THE CARL AND VERNA SCHMIDT FOUNDATION.