Barry Hoffman has been a teacher, a publisher, an editor, and, of course, a writer. Hoffman’s nine adult books have been well received by critics and most recently, he is the author of the popular young adult trilogy, The Shamra Chronicles. What do all of his novels have in common? All have females as protagonists and more than half of the antagonists are also females. These female characters are strong and often flawed, but they are definitely not dependent on males to save the day.
As the father to two strong-willed, independent daughters (one of whom was named after Shamra’s Dara), grandfather to a sixteen-year old granddaughter in the same mold, and teacher to fifth to eighth grade students, Barry was influenced to write these kinds of strong female characters. Throughout his thirty years as an inner-city school teacher in Philadelphia, he found the eleven to fourteen year old girls he taught to have unique and diverse personalities, which helped shape the young women in The Shamra Chronicles and his adult novels.
Barry believes that adolescent and teenage girls need to read books where there are positive role models with which they can identify. He has written all three Shamra Chronicles books: Curse of the Shamra, Shamra Divided, and Chaos Unleashed with the hope that girls will latch onto Dara as an independent, increasingly mature young woman, rather than reading novels where the main female character is submissive and subject to the whims of the boy over which she obsesses.
Inspired by President Obama’s call to give back to the community, Barry set out to donate 10,000 copies of his young adult novel Curse of the Shamra in 2009. He provided copies to schools (with a special focus on Title 1 schools in dire need of resources), libraries, military families, Girl Scouts, and other organizations with a Young Adult audience. He surpassed his goal, giving away 11,145 copies of The Shamra Chronicles!
Barry also conducted an Author in Residence program in 2009 and 2010 at classrooms in Colorado. The students all received free copies of Curse of the Shamra, and Barry led weekly discussions about characters, plot developments, choices made and their consequences, along with discussing critical thinking and writing skills. The project culminated with student projects and essays.
Hoffman's adult novels are often ripped from the headlines. Hungry Eyes was inspired by a young girl kidnapped by a neighbor. Eyes of Prey is based on Bernhard Goetz, the famous NYC subway vigilante. His stand alone novel Born Bad was banned at the University of Pennsylvania (the setting for the book) due to suicides the novel explores. Like Edgar Allan Poe and Richard Matheson he is a minimalist focusing on character and plot.
In addition to writing The Shamra Chronicles and nine other novels, Barry is well-known as the Publisher and Editor of Gauntlet Magazine, a magazine dealing with censorship, and as Publisher at Gauntlet Press, Winner of 1999 Stoker Award for Best Small Press, which produces collectible editions of classic and previously unpublished books. Barry has lived in Colorado since 2002. He grew up in New York and spent his entire teaching career in Philadelphia.
