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Héctor Tobar is the Los Angeles-born author of four books, including the novels The Tattooed Soldier and The Barbarian Nurseries. 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 the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was also a New York Times bestseller and adapted into the film The 33. The Barbarian Nurseries was a New York Times Notable Book and won the California Book Award Gold Medal for fiction. Tobar’s fiction has also appeared in Zyzzyva and in Best American Short Stories 2016. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine, and has taught writing and journalism at several universities, including Pomona College and the University of Oregon. As a journalist, he was a foreign correspondent with the Los Angeles Times in Buenos Aires and Mexico City, and a part of the reporting team that earned a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Tobar has also been an op-ed writer for the New York Times and a contributor to the New Yorker. He is the son of Guatemalan immigrants.