Barak Engel

Professionally, I am best known for pioneering the "virtual CISO" (Chief Information Security Officer, an emerging corporate executive role) and subsequently popularizing it.

But this is the Author's Guild, so who cares, right? such a fascinating challenge, to write an author's biograpy!

I have been writing from the moment I took a breather from reading. As a child, I won an award for a cartoon I created at age 6, became bilingual by age 8, and was an avid bookworm. Speed reading is da bomb, yo.

I took a couple of creative writing classes in college, and tried my hand at investigative journalism. I also wrote a bridge (the game) column for a local newspaper for a little while. Later on I was reviewer, then editor, at the Games Domain Review, the world's second largest video gaming e-zine, back in the 90's.

Since moving to the United States in late 1999, I had written a fair number of random professional pieces which were published by trade media. I had also ghostwritten articles for my customers' executives to publish under their own names to help promote their technology and product operations, and contributed a chapter to a book that was published by Raymann Group ("the Guide to Operational Excellence").

Eventually, all of this culminated in getting my own book published by Taylor and Francis in 2017, and a followup one in 2022.

With all that, my hidden passion in writing is fiction. I have written numerous short stories, a couple of novellas, and more poems than I can count. I have, on two occasions, gotten cold feet after being offered an opportunity to publish these works: (1) as a collection of poems detailing an Internet love story (back in the 90's); and (2) when I met one of my top favorite authors, Orson Scott Card, at a book signing. I brought his (probably) least known books - the "how to write" ones - for him to sign, which made him curious. When my speech exhibited my accent, he invited me to send him one of my short stories for possible inclusion in an anthology he was working on, of stories in English by non-native English speakers. Awestruck as I was, I barely managed a thank you before walking out. I then consistently failed to follow up, which introspection has led me to admit was simply the result of preferring the invitation to the - in my mind - inevitable rejection.