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"He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America."
    -- Carson McCullers on Jake Blount, in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

I was born in Chicago. After graduating from Harvard I worked in Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America as a community developer and sociologist. I am by now, I guess, bilingual -- I speak Spanish about as easily or poorly as English. Currently I live in Spain with my compañera, architect Susana Torre. People here call me "Gef" (my initials and I lot easier in Spanish than "Geoff").

Nonfiction books include Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics and the Constructing of Identity (U. Arizona Press), The Land and People of Argentina and The Land and People of Venezuela (HarperCollins), Working Class Émigrés from Cuba (Ph.D. dissertation from Northwestern University) and Gabriel García Márquez's 100 Years of Solitude (Monarch Notes).  Coming up: a book with Susana on the history of architecture and urbanism in Latin America (to be published by W. W. Norton). I also write a weekly note on current events or trends in Spain, posted (on Sundays) on my blog Literature & Society. 

My published fiction includes the short-story collection Welcome to My Contri and other stories in print or on-line. (See Fiction.) Also, I advise my Venezuelan colleague Baltasar Lotroyo on his fiction in Spanish.

For a list of publications and positions held, please see Curriculum vitae.

For a historic photo of a very young Geoff Fox, see "Freedom Drivers."

And for another note, see "Madman on the Subway"

Building a Stairway

When I graduated from college, all I wanted to do was save the world and meet girls. And so I lept at the opportunity to join a US community development organization called "ACCION en Venezuela" which sent youngAmericans and other foreigners to Venezuela to bring  "know-how" to poor urban communities and organize their inhabitants. That was 1963, and the prevailing idea among the corporate and government leaders backing the project was that underdevelopment was the fault of the poor themselves, and the cure was to change their culture. That we were foreigners, new to the tropics, the language and the customs, was considered an asset, because it meant we were uncorrupted.

But Barrio Sucre, the first shantytown I was sent to in Caracas, was already organized, and ignorance of the customs was no asset. In this narrow gulley in Petare, on the eastern edge of Caracas, some 300 houses of cardboard and mud-and-wattle (bahareque) perched precariously on the slopes. To build a stairway was a long-standing goal of a group bound by kinship, hometown origins, and a history of struggle that I caught only hints of. They themselves supplied the "know-how," including the ability to mobilize; I provided the use of my organization's jeep and contacts for getting donations of cement, sand, gravel and lumber. Together, we built the stairway one Saturday, swinging bucket after bucket of cement mix up to our shoulders, scrambling up the slope to dump it into the topmost frame laid out by their own master carpenter and staggering down to do it again. Afterward, we celebrated with a huge sancocho. 

When I went back a few years ago, the houses were brick and the stairway a part of the landscape, taken for granted by its many users. Most were strangers, but I saw one man who had worked at my side that day, and we hugged and smiled. Together, and with those other compañeros of long ago, we had saved a small part of the world. It had been a good place to start.

It took me a little longer to discover that meeting girls, while fun, was not enough -- I needed to find the right one, because saving the world, even one small part at a time, requires a lot of combined strength. After several false starts, I finally did. For the past 20 years my accomplice has been the architect Susana Torre, and we're still trying to save whatever portions of the world we can, by writing, design, teaching, and just trying to be decent persons. I'm still building that stairway.

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Ursinius Baer, known in our offices as "Bear" or "Oso," joined Geoffrey Fox Productions in December of 1996. He propped open the window of our bedroom on one dark and troubled night and clambered in, giving us quite a fright until we realized that he was guarding the house rather than attacking it. Since then he has assumed many critical duties, including bookkeeping and dunning creditors (at which he is very effective). He is an essential part of the team, making sure that projects stay on track and that deadlines are met. He has collaborated on every bit of writing from Geoffrey Fox Productions since joining the team, and often serves as team captain on particular nonfiction projects -- especially when they begin to lag behind deadlines. Write to Bear.

Leo Arslan, or "Lion," joined Geoffrey Fox Productions at approximately the same time as Bear -- or more precisely, about five minutes later, sliding gracefully through the already opened window. Like Bear, he immediately assumed a position as protector of the household, though in quite a different style. Lion is more openly confrontational, and although he sometimes has to be restrained from taking offense where none was intended, his roar can be very effective in getting attention. While he does not have the same steady attention span as bear, he thinks quickly and frequently comes up with startling solutions to difficult problems. In recent years, he has specialized in assisting Geoffrey Fox Productions on fiction projects. On some short pieces, he has served as the project captain -- though everyone on the team is expected to collaborate on all projects. Write to Lion.

(Mr. Glib has so far resisted all efforts to photograph him; we suspect that this is because he is simultaneously working under other names for other authors and does not want to risk discovery. In fact, we know that some authors turn over entire projects to Glib. (We just did a search for "Mr. Glib" on Google, and came up with lots of surprising gigs we didn't know he had. Try it.) Bear and Lion have argued that Glib should not be permitted to touch their prose at all, but Fox has overruled this position as too extreme. In our office, Glib is permitted only to retouch work that has already been created by one or a combination of the other three of us.) Write to Glib.