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CORVALLIS, Ore. - Novelist and journalist Héctor Tobar will read at Oregon State University on Friday, Jan. 15.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will be at 7:30 p.m. in the Valley Library Rotunda, 201 S.W. Waldo Place, Corvallis. A question-and-answer session and book signing will follow. 

Tobar is the author of "Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle that Set Them Free." The book chronicles an official account of the 2010 Copiapó mining accident. The 33 miners chose Tobar to write a single history of the event and the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.

The Boston Globe said of the book: "Héctor Tobar's masterful re-creation of the 2010 San José Mine collapse shows 33 ordinary men challenged to pull together as dire circumstances and diverse personalities pull them apart."

Tobar is a longtime journalist who has worked for The New Yorker, LA Weekly, and in multiple positions at the Los Angeles Times, where he wrote hundreds of articles and contributed to the newspaper's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

His other novels include "The Tattooed Soldier" (1998) and "The Barbarian Nurseries" (2011), which was named a New York Times Notable Book for 2011 and won the 2012 California Book Award gold medal for fiction. His nonfiction work in 2005 includes "Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States."

In 2006, Tobar was named one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics in the United States by Hispanic Business magazine. He earned a master of fine arts in fiction at University of California, Irvine, and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Oregon.

The reading is part of the 2015-2016 Literary Northwest Series, sponsored by the MFA Program in Creative Writing in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film. The series brings Pacific Northwest writers to OSU and is made possible with support from the OSU Libraries and Press; the OSU School of Writing, Literature, and Film; the College of Liberal Arts; Kathy Brisker and Tim Steele; and Grass Roots Books and Music.