Jonathan Curiel is a journalist in San Francisco. A staff writer with the San Francisco Chronicle, he is the author of Al’ America: Travels Through America’s Arab and Islamic Roots. The book, to be published by The New Press in November of 2008, details the historic influence of Arab and Muslim culture on America, from the time of Columbus to the modern age. Among the areas covered: Islamic architecture and the World Trade Center; Arab music and the 1960s; Persian poetry and Ralph Waldo Emerson; Arabic designs and Arabic tattoos; and Elvis Presley’s and P.T. Barnum’s links to Arab and Muslim culture. From October of 2005 to April of 2006, Curiel was a Reuters Foundation fellow at Oxford University in England, where he researched and wrote a 10,000-word paper on the historic impact of Islamic architecture on synagogue and church architecture. During the 1993-1994 academic year, Curiel lived in Lahore, Pakistan, where he taught journalism as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of the Punjab. In 2005, Curiel's Chronicle work was honored by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. (Curiel was one of a select number of American journalists -- including CBS's Ed Bradley -- cited for doing outstanding articles or programs on race and ethnicity.) Curiel has written freelance stories for the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, Columbia Journalism Review, American Journalism Review, Salon, the Advocate magazine, Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, and The Wire (a London music magazine), and has done freelance work for Sight & Sound, TV Guide and Maclean's magazine (Canada's equivalent of Time and Newsweek). His articles have been reprinted in such publications as The Globe and Mail (Canada's national daily newspaper), Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Orange County Register, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Hartford Courant, New York Post and New York Daily News. Besides the United States, Curiel has reported from Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Japan, Egypt, Morocco and Mali. For the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival (the oldest film festival in the Americas) he was a juror for the $10,000 Skyy Prize. For Harlan Jacobson’s Talk Cinema, he has spoken about such films as The Triplets of Belleville and the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others and An Inconvenient Truth. Curiel has been a moderator or panelist at the University of San Francisco, the Commonwealth Club, and the Foundation Royaumont outside of Paris. In Tangier, Morocco, he gave a keynote address at Performing Tangier 2008: Borders, Beats and Beyond, an academic conference in 2008 organized by the Tangier-based International Centre for Performance Studies.