Geoffrey Fox

Born in Chicago, Geoffrey Fox graduated from Harvard in 1963 and worked as a community organizer in Caracas and in Latino barrios of Chicago before earning a PhD in sociology. His books on Latin American society and culture have been published by HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and the University of Arizona Press, which published Hispanic Nation, his best-selling book on the emerging power of Latinos in the U.S. His articles, op-eds and book reviews have appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, the Village Voice and other publications. Geoffrey Fox's short story collection Welcome to My Contri, first published in 1988, was described by The New York Times Book Review as a "short and impressive work" in which "Mr. Fox [...] has created a memorable set of players who, while not natural antagonists (they often share the same dreams and goals), are still somehow bent on confrontation. Watching their sometimes vicious, often darkly humorous interactions leaves us thoroughly wrung out and aware that we are in the presence of a formidable new writer". In 2010, Welcome to My Contri was reissued as an ebook with a new introduction and two new stories. His novel, A Gift for the Sultan (2010), about the conflicts, collaborations and conspiracies between Ottoman Turks and Byzantines in the years before the Ottoman seizure of Constantinople, has been translated into Turkish by Nokta Publishers in Istanbul. Since 2008, Fox has been living with his partner, architect Susana Torre, on the edge of the Mediterranean in the village of Carboneras in Andalusia, Spain, where his short stories (in Spanish) under the pen name "Baltasar Lotroyo" ("el otro yo" = alter ego in Spanish) have appeared in anthologies and online publications.