[1] Wilentz received a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, as well as a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction.

[7][8] She spent a year after graduation on a Harvard/Radcliffe fellowship at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France.

She also worked for Ben Sonnenberg's literary periodical Grand Street in its early years.

Her memoir, I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger was published in 2006.

Wilentz is married to Nicholas Goldberg, opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times.