Barr, Gonzalo

PERSONAL:

Born in Miami, FL. Education: Graduated from Columbia University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Miami, FL. E-mail—gb@gonzalobarr.com.

CAREER:

Writer, attorney.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for fiction, from the Bread Loaf Writers' conference at Middlebury College, 2005.

WRITINGS:

The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa: Stories, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2006.

Contributor of short fiction to periodicals, including Gulf Stream and the Street Miami.

SIDELIGHTS:

Gonzalo Barr was born in Miami, Florida, where his first language was Spanish and he taught himself English by watching television as a child. Fascinated by language and stories at a young age, Barr routinely skipped his classes to go to the school library and read, staking out a prime table that gave him a view of the bay filled with sail boats as he read. While the librarian was aware what Barr was doing, she never reported him, instead allowing him to continue his self-education. Although he read widely, Barr was particularly interested in and later influenced by the writings of Albert Camus and Kurt Vonnegut, and he read everything he could find by those authors. Eventually Barr tried his hand at writing on his own, and began to work on short stories during his time in the library. Two of his early efforts went on to appear in his school's literary magazine. As Barr grew older and faced greater responsibilities, his writing took a back seat to furthering his education and starting to work, but he never gave it up entirely, instead writing in secret in his private time. Barr went on to attend Columbia University, studying medicine and law, and traveled extensively, living in such varied places as New York, Paris, Italy, and the Dominican Republic, which gave him the chance to learn more languages, a further asset to his writing. He eventually published short stories in Gulf Stream and the Street Miami, and was awarded the prestigious Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for fiction, from the Bread Loaf Writers' conference in 2005. Barr's first book, The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa: Stories, was released in 2006.

The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa collects nine short stories, all set in Barr's home town of Miami, and offers readers an inside look into the lives of an eclectic group of characters, ranging from two men who reached Miami on a raft from Cuba to a television anchor grappling with a difficult story to a man who owns a paint store. The stories were considered uneven by several critics, with some clichéd characters, but overall received a warm reception. Vanessa Juarez, reviewing for Entertainment Weekly, called the book ‘an entertaining end-of-the-mojito-season read,’ and in particular praised the last two stories in the volume, including the title story. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly remarked that ‘Barr demonstrates fine storytelling with a good ear for nuance."