Ingrid Rojas Contreras & Héctor Tobar

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. Rojas Contreras interweaves family stories, resurrects Colombian history, and writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance.  The book won a Medal in Nonfiction from the California Book Awards. It was named a “Best Book of the Year” by TIME, People, NPR, Vanity Fair, and Boston Globe, among others. Her first novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Zyzzyva, and is forthcoming from Harper’s. Rojas Contreras has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She is a Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College.

Héctor Tobar is a Los Angeles born author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His recent book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”, explores how a century of immigration policy and the evolving image of the “alien” in US culture have helped shape American notions of racial identity and “whiteness.” Tobar's other books include the New York Times bestseller, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free, the novels, The Tattooed Soldier, The Barbarian Nurseries, and The Last Great Road Bum. He's written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harpers, National Geographic, and was a contributing writer for the New York Times opinion pages. Tobar has also been a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and its bureau chief in Buenos Aires and Mexico City.