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Daniel Olivas
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| Born | Los Angeles, California |
| Occupation | Author of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, plays; attorney |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Stanford University, BA in English literature (1981); University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, JD (1984) |
| Website | |
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Daniel Anthony Olivas is an American author and attorney.[1]
Daniel Olivas was raised near downtown Los Angeles, the middle of five children and the grandson of Mexican immigrants. He attended St. Thomas the Apostle grammar school, and then Loyola High School. Olivas received his BA in English literature from Stanford University and Juris Doctor degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Olivas met fellow law student, Susan Formaker at UCLA and they married in 1986. They have one son.[2]
Olivas has practiced law with the California Department of Justice as a deputy and supervising deputy attorney general, and as a senior assistant attorney general, since 1990. Prior to 1990, he was in private practice with the now-defunct Heller Ehrman LLP.
Before becoming a fiction writer, Olivas authored legal articles, essays and book reviews for the Los Angeles Daily Journal. He started writing fiction in 1998 with the publication of his first short story in the literary journal, RiversEdge published by the University of Texas-Pan American.
His first book was a novella, The Courtship of María Rivera Peña, which was published by a small and now-defunct Pennsylvania-based press, Silver Lake Publishing in 2000 and is now out of print. The novella is loosely based on Olivas's paternal grandparents' migration from Mexico to Los Angeles in the 1920s.
Three short-story collections followed in quick succession, each published by Bilingual Press, a publisher affiliated with Arizona State University. They are Assumption and Other Stories (2003), Devil Talk: Stories (2004) and Anywhere But L.A.: Stories (2009).
In September 2017, Olivas published another collection, The King of Lighting Fixtures (University of Arizona Press).
In February 2022, Olivas published the collection, How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories (University of Nevada Press). BuzzFeed offered a positive review observing, in part: "Throughout all of his stories, there are strong Chicano characters, who embody tales that range from the laugh-out-loud funny to the heartbreaking. A timely retrospective from an important voice in Latinx literature."[3] Alta Journal's review said "Prompted by tragedy—the death of his father and the pandemic—Olivas revisits decades of writing to produce this collection of new and previously published stories. Olivas’s work is surreal, dystopian, critical, and introspective, ultimately moving into contemporary political rhetoric."[4] In a review published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, the novelist Michael Nava noted, in part: "This deeply textured, sensual collection more than accomplishes Olivas’s self-proclaimed task of rendering the beauty and complexity of Mexican and Mexican American culture in its fabulist, folkloric stories."[5]
In 2011, the University of Arizona Press published Olivas's first novel, The Book of Want. The novel is written in the magical realist tradition but also includes postmodern elements such as sections where characters are interviewed about being in the novel itself, text messages, and a short play.
On March 20, 2023, Forest Avenue Press announced the acquisition of Olivas's novel, Chicano Frankenstein, with a publication date in 2024, noting that the novel "addresses issues of belonging and assimilation through a modern retelling of the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley classic." In a pre-publication blurb, Eileen Hunt Botting observed: “In the genre-bending tradition of Mary Shelley, Daniel Olivas's latest novel Chicano Frankenstein expertly stitches together gothic political satire, science fiction, and existential metafiction to expose the racist and classist hypocrisies that undergird the American political economy under tyrannical right-wing leaders.” On November 3, 2023, the Boston Review published an excerpt from Chicano Frankenstein. On May 8, 2024, after the novel's publication, NPR's Code Switch podcast ran an interview with Olivas regarding his novel where he discussed the anti-immigrant political rhetoric of the 2020 midterm elections that inspired him to write the book.
Between 2003 and 2010, the Los Angeles Times published six of Olivas's children's stories. One of those stories, "Benjamin and the Word," was republished by Arte Público Press in 2005 as a bilingual picture book. The story revolves around a boy named Benjamin who is Chicano and Jewish and who suffers bigoted taunts on the schoolyard.
Olivas edited Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (Bilingual Press, 2008), where he brought together sixty years of Los Angeles fiction by Latino writers. The volume collected some of the best-known Latino writers Luis Alberto Urrea, Helena María Viramontes, Luis Rodriguez, Kathleen Alcalá and John Rechy, and also introduced writers at the beginning of their careers Melinda Palacio, Manuel Muñoz, Salvador Plascencia and Reyna Grande.
In 2016, Tía Chucha Press released The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles which Olivas co-edited with Neelanjana Banerjee and Ruben J. Rodriguez. The anthology includes a wide range of poetry by including writers Dana Gioia, Ruben Martinez, Wanda Coleman, Holly Prado.
In 2023, Olivas was named co-editor of the new book series from the University of Nevada Press, The New Oeste: Literatura Latinx of the American West in the 21st century. The co-editor is the poet, León Salvatierra.
On June 1, 2014, San Diego State University Press published Olivas's first nonfiction book, Things We Do Not Talk About: Exploring Latino/a Literature through Essays and Interviews. The volume brings together essays that have appeared in The New York Times, La Bloga, Jewish Journal, California Lawyer, and other publications, that address topics from the Mexican-American experience to the Holocaust. The book also includes 28 interviews that Olivas conducted over the years with Latino/a writers including Daniel Alarcón, Gustavo Arellano, Richard Blanco, Sandra Cisneros, Héctor Tobar, Luis Alberto Urrea, Justin Torres, Reyna Grande, and Helena María Viramontes.
In November 2017, Olivas published his first book of poems, Crossing the Border: Collected Poems (Pact Press).
Olivas wrote his first full-length play Waiting for Godínez in 2019.[6] He explained that he was inspired both by Samuel Beckett’s iconic Waiting for Godot and the absurd, anti-immigrant policies of the federal government. It was also selected for Playwrights' Arena's Summer Reading Series (2020), The Road Theatre's Twelfth Annual Summer Playwrights Festival (2021),[7] the Garry Marshall Theatre's New Works Festival (2022), and was a semi-finalist in the 2021 Blue Ink Play Award sponsored by American Blues Theater.[8] The play had its world premiere on April 5, 2024, in a Teatro Espejo production in Sacramento, California, directed by Devin Valdez.
In 2020 Olivas was selected for Circle X Theatre Co.'s inaugural Evolving Playwrights Group to adapt his novel The Book of Want (University of Arizona Press, 2011). The play had a Zoom reading on June 21, 2021, which was directed by Daphnie Sicre.
Olivas's first live, staged play, Waiting, had its world premiere with Playwrights' Arena on July 24, 2021.[9]
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