Héctor Tobar is a Los Angeles-born author of six books, including his recent work Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino, winner of the Kirkus Prize, the Zocalo Book Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book. His nonfiction work 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 M.F.A. 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 other publications. He is the son of Guatemalan immigrants.
At MacDowell, Tobar worked on his novel, My Mysteries, My Metropolis, the second in a series of novels about the future, present, and past of Los Angeles. His first novel in the series, My Beloved, My Metropolis, was recently sold to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux's MCD imprint.
Portrait by Patrice Normand Agence Opale
