Sam Quinones (pronounced Kin-YOH-Ness) is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist, a reporter for 37 years, and author of four acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction. He is a veteran reporter on immigration, gangs, drug trafficking, the border. He is formerly a reporter with the L.A. Times, where he worked for 10 years. Before that, he made a living as a freelance writer residing in Mexico for a decade.
His latest book is The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work (Bloomsbury Press, 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 – with hard work, focus, and collaboration. He found them in the tuba and in marching band. The Perfect Tuba exalts the love of effort with no promise of wealth or fame. Tuba and marching band “teach the values that sustain community,” Quinones writes. He came to believe that they held lessons for a country in the midst of a drug-addiction epidemic, for how to create lasting value, enduring results, in art, in community, and in business.
His fourth book was released in November, 2021: The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. In The Least of Us, Quinones chronicles the emergence of a drug-trafficking world producing massive supplies of synthetic drugs (fentanyl and meth) cheaper and deadlier than ever, marketing to the population of addicts created by the nation's opioid epidemic. With The Least of Us, Quinones broke the story of how the methamphetamine now produced in Mexico has covered the U.S. and is creating widespread and rapid-onset symptoms of schizophrenia, becoming in the process a major driver in the country’s homeless problem. In January 2022, The Least of Us was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) award for Best Nonfiction Book of 2021.
The Least of Us follows his landmark Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury, 2015), which ignited awareness of the epidemic that has cost the United States hundreds of thousands of lives and become deadliest drug scourge in the nation’s history. Dreamland won a National Book Critics Circle award for the Best Nonfiction Book of 2015. Slate.com selected Dreamland as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last 25 years. GQ Magazine selected Dreamland as one of the “50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21 st Century”