Sam Quinones

Sam Quinones (pronounced Kin-YOH-Ness) is a journalist, storyteller, and author of five acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction. He writes the weekly Dreamland Newsletter on Substack.

He is formerly worked as a reporter with the L.A. Times for 10 years. Before that, he made a living as a freelance writer residing in Mexico for a decade (1994-2004).

His most recent book, "The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work", was released in fall, 2025.

"The Perfect Tuba" grew from Quinones’ desire to write about something different after a dozen years chronicling our national epidemic of drug addiction.

He went looking for stories of people forging fulfillment from within, through hard work. He found them in the tuba and in marching band directors.

He came to view tuba players and band directors as, in fact, antidotes to the nation's epidemic of drug addiction. Teaching the values that sustain community: perseverance, discipline, focus, postponed gratification, and collaboration.

“A mind cleanse for our time,” is how one podcast describes The Perfect Tuba. "An American symphony," wrote a Substack economist.

The Wall Street Journal brilliantly reviewed the book, as did the classical music website, Musical America, which began its review with: “The Perfect Tuba , the latest book by veteran journalist Sam Quinones, is the perfect book for those days when the weight of the world makes it hard to get out of bed.”

That follows his 2021 book, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, which charted the emergence of two synthetic drugs from Mexico, and chronicled Americans’ stories of community rebuilding.

His landmark "Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic" was released in 2015 by Bloomsbury Press and narrated twin tales of drug marketing: pharmaceutical companies pushing prescription narcotics painkillers and Mexican drug traffickers hawking black-tar heroin like pizza. "The Least of Us" was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) award for Best Nonfiction Book of 2021.

"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, 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.com readers. Also in 2019, Slate.com selected Dreamland as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last 25 years.

In 2021, GQ Magazine selected Dreamland as one of the “50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century.” Columbia Journalism School selected Quinones as a 2008 recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot prize, for a career of excellence in covering Latin America. He is also a 1998 recipient of an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, one of the most prestigious fellowships given to print journalists.