A person with a bald head and goatee is wearing a gray suit with a striped shirt. They are looking at the camera with a slight smile. The background is blurred greenery.

Héctor Tobar

Héctor Tobar is a Los Angeles-born author of six books, including, most recently, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino, winner of the Kirkus Prize and other honors. His nonfiction Deep Down Dark was a New York Times bestseller and adapted into the film The 33. His novel The Barbarian Nurseries won the California Book Award Gold Medal and was a New York Times Notable Book. Tobar’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, and he earned his MFA from UC Irvine, where he is currently a professor. At the Los Angeles Times he was a foreign correspondent and was part of a reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize. Tobar has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Harvard Radcliffe fellow, an op-ed writer for the New York Times, and a contributor to The New Yorker, National Geographic, and The New York Review of Books, among many other publications. He is the son of Guatemalan immigrants.