Join the SF Travel Lectures Series on Wednesday, May 16th when we will welcome Conner Gorry direct from Cuba!
About Conner Gorry:
Author of over a dozen Lonely Planet guides, Conner Gorry’s first foreign adventure was to Vieques at age 8. A formative experience in the truest sense of the word, that trip ignited a fascination with Latin America that, three decades on, is a way of life. Indeed: since 2002, Conner has been based in Havana, Cuba, writing about what living on the island is really like.
A native New Yorker, Conner first went to Cuba as a volunteer in 1993 and relocated to Havana to report on the Cuban health system for Oakland-based MEDICC Review. She is the only American journalist to have reported on Cuban doctors in settings as diverse as post-disaster Pakistan and Haiti, the barrios of Caracas, and the Honduran Mosquito Coast. Following the harrowing earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, Conner was posted with Cuban disaster relief doctors to report on their work in the NWFP and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, an experience that served as precursor to her month-long posting with the Cuban relief team in Port-au-Prince following the earthquake in Haiti.
Conner honed her writing chops churning out features for the San Francisco Chronicle and others before landing on Lonely Planet’s roster, when the real adventures began. She has written guides on post civil war Guatemala and post 9-11 NYC; hiked Big Island volcanoes and careened down Bolivia’s (and the world’s) “most dangerous road;” and kayaked the Na Pali Coast and picked along Cuba’s secret beaches. Every new travel experience informs her work including the Lonely Planet guide to the Big Island (Hawai’i), Guatemala Great Destinations, and Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011 – all available in bookstores now. Recent assignments include Cuba content for PBS, BBC, New York Magazine, and Scientific American.
Her blog, Here is Havana, is continuously updated despite a laborious 48kbp dial up connection, and in 2010, Conner launched Havana Good Time – the top-rated Havana travel iApp on iTunes and the only one written and maintained from Cuba. She is currently finishing a book chronicling contemporary life on the island – including her own.
For details of Conner’s work, including clips, see www.connergorry.com and www.hereishavana.wordpress.com.