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Héctor Tobar is the Los Angeles-born author of six books, including the novels The Tattooed Soldier, The Barbarian Nurseries, and The Last Great Road Bum. His non-fiction Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of Thirty-Three Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle that Set Them Free, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Timesbestseller. His books have been translated into fifteen languages. The Barbarian Nurseries won the California Book Award Gold Medal for fiction. Tobar’s fiction has also appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016 and 2022. He earned his MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he is currently a professor. As a journalist, he was a member of the reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. Tobar has also been an op-ed writer for the New York Times and a contributor to The New Yorker, Harper’s, Smithsonian, and National Geographic. He is also a recipient of a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His most recent book is Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino.” He is the son of Guatemalan immigrants.
