Video chat: Author Amy Wilentz on Haiti, Tuesday, Jan. 29, 10 a.m.

Join us Tuesday for a live video conversation with award-winning author Amy Wilentz about her new book, “Farewell, Fred Voodoo.” After a massive earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, Wilentz, a journalist who has been writing about the country for more than two decades, felt compelled to return. This is the story she came back with, one that weaves history and culture to understand a fractured present.

“Haiti needs to be understood in Haitian terms,” Wilentz writes.

In his review of the book in the L.A. Times, Hector Tobar writes: “ ‘Farewell, Fred Voodoo’ is a love letter to — and a lament for — Haiti, a country with an already strange and tortured history that became even more tragic, interesting and convoluted in the months after the earthquake.... Unlike the vast majority of reporters writing about Haiti and other developing countries, Wilentz has absorbed the idea that the locals have a radically different way of understanding their country — and that Haitian beliefs are usually better at explaining Haitian reality than the ideas of well-meaning but essentially naive Westerners.”

Tobar will be interviewing Wilentz in our chat. They’ll talk about the book and about her experiences working as a journalist in Haiti.

Join us for that live conversation, Tuesday, Jan. 29 at 10 a.m. We’ll be using Spreecast, so you can submit questions as the conversation is going. Or if you already know what you’d like to ask, Tweet it to us, @latimesbooks on Twitter.

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