User:JBRiverside/sandbox

Richard Schweid
Richard Schweid (July 21, 1946) is an American journalist and the author of many nonfiction books of general interest. His work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, Russian, German, Chinese, and Japanese.

Life and Work

Schweid was born on July 21, 1946 in Nashville, Tennessee, where his parents owned and operated a well-known independent bookstore, Mills Bookstore, and he was exposed to the written word early in life.[1] After graduating from Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, he attended Boston University for two years, majoring in English. In 1968 he went to Europe and was in Paris for the May protests, and subsequently passed months on Formentera, one of the Balearic Islands off the eastern coast of Spain.

Returning to the US in the fall of 1969, Schweid spent the winter living on a communal farm in southern Vermont.[2] He moved to the West Coast, settling for five years in Oregon. In 1978, he published his first book, Hot Peppers, drawn from six weeks of research in New Iberia, Louisiana. In 1981, he resettled in Nashville, and began working as a reporter for The Tennessean, under editor-in-chief John Seigenthaler.

In 1991, he moved permanently to Barcelona. That year he was hired as Associated Press’s Barcelona stringer by Susan Linnee, the Spanish Bureau Chief, and he reported for AP until 2001. In 1996, he co-founded Barcelona’s first city magazine in English, Barcelona Metropolitan, where he worked as Senior Editor until 2009.[3]

Schweid also worked as a producer and reporter on two dozen documentaries for TV3, Catalonia’s public television station. He worked as Production Manager on the feature-length documentary Balseros, about Cuban refugees. Directed by Carlos Bosch, the film received an Oscar nomination in 2004.[4] Schweid’s experiences in Cuba led to his book, Che’s Chevrolet and Fidel’s Oldsmobile: On the road in Cuba. In 2018 he managed production of an hour-long documentary, L’América de Trump for Spain’s Channel Four.[5]

He and his wife, Carmen Martínez Gómez, currently spend summers in  coastal Rhode Island and winters in Barcelona. Dr. Martínez, formerly a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, retired in 2016. Schweid’s son, Daniel Winunwe Rivers (August 13, 1970), is a professor of American History at Ohio State University at Columbus.

Books

--Hot Peppers: The story of Cajuns and capsicum (1978, 1999), ISBN 978-0807848265

--Catfish and the Delta: Confederate fish farming in the Mississippi Delta (1992), ISBN 978-0898154559

--Barcelona: Jews, Transvestites, and An Olympic Season (1994), ISBN 978-0898155785

--The Cockroach Papers: A compendium of history and lore (1999, 2015), ISBN 978-0226260471

--Consider the Eel (2002) ISBN 0-8078-2693-6

--Che’s Chevrolet, Fidel’s Oldsmobile: On the road in Cuba (2004), ISBN 0-8078-2892-0

--Hereafter: Searching for immortality (2006) ISBN 978-1-56025-657-1

--Eel (2009) ISBN 978-1-86189-423-6

--Octopus (2014) ISBN 978-1-78023-177-8

--Invisible Nation: Homeless families in America (2016) ISBN 978-0-5202-9267-3

--Nashville: Music and manners (2021) ISBN 978-1-78914-315-7

--The Caring Class: Home Health Aides in Crisis (2021), ISBN 978-1501754104

External videos:

Presentation by Schweid on Invisible Nation: Homeless Families in America October 15, 2016, C-SPAN https://www.c-span.org/video/?416749-4/richard-schweid-discusses-invisible-nation

Interview with Schweid and novelist Steve Yarbrough about African-American catfish farmer Ed Scott. https://www.southernfoodways.org/film/on-flavor/

Interview with John Seigenthaler about Catfish and the Delta, March 29,1993 https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-524-8c9r20ss2v

Interview with John Seigenthaler about Che’s Chevrolet, Fidel’s Oldsmobile https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-524-bg2h708z7m