Hector Tobar, Chicano/Latino studies & English associate professor, loves to write. He’s authored four books and has another in progress, which follows the story of an American who circled the globe in the 1960s, 70s and 80s and died fighting with the rebels in the Salvadoran revolution. His 2014 book, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of Thirty-Three Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, was a Silver Medal California Book Award winner, one of Publishers Weekly’s Best 10 Books of the Year, and a New York Times Notable Book and Bestseller for eight weeks running. It was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. His prior book, The Barbarian Nurseries, a novel, earned a Gold Medal California Book Award, the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award for Fiction, and was a New York Times Notable Book.

His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories 2016, and he has a piece forthcoming in Tales of Two Cities, an anthology on inequality in the U.S. He’s also the co-editor of a forthcoming book called The Wandering Song, an Anthology of Central American Writing.

Tobar began his career in the late 1980s as an editor of El Tecolote, a San Francisco newspaper. He then moved on to the Los Angeles Times where he spent five years as a metro reporter (1988-93) and took a brief hiatus to work for one year as the features editor at the LA Weekly before returning to the LA Times. He spent 18 years with the Los Angeles paper, holding posts as critic, columnist, foreign correspondent, national correspondent, and city reporter. Among his career highlights: three years as the Mexico City bureau chief, four years as the Buenos Aires bureau chief, and three years as a national correspondent. He also worked in the publication’s Baghdad bureau. He earned numerous awards for his writing, including a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news with the staff in 1993 and an Inter-American Press Association Award for Feature Writing. In 2006, Tobar was named among the 100 Most Influential Hispanics in the United States by Hispanic Business Magazine. He left the LA Times in 2014 and has since been working as a contributor to the op-ed pages of The New York Times. [Check out his most recent NYT piece: socs.ci/tobarnyt17].

Alongside his journalism career, Tobar has also held academic positions as a lecturer with Antioch University in Los Angeles, Loyola Marymount University, Pomona College, and Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. Beginning in 2014, he was an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communications at the University of Oregon.

Tobar earned his MFA in creative writing, fiction at UCI in 1995 and he’s excited to be coming back to California and his alma mater. UCI’s diverse study body – particularly its large Latino student population – was a big draw for the acclaimed writer. He’s excited to teach both writing and critical thinking, and he feels strongly that anyone can master the incredibly powerful form of expression that is writing, as long as the individual taps into his or her internal artist and thinker. 

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