Michael Nava

Michael Nava, the author of five novels featuring California-based gay Latino attorney Henry Rios, has much in common with his series’ protagonist. Nava, a third-generation Mexican American, was raised in the Sacramento barrio of Gardenland. The second of six children, he realized at an early age that the only way to escape his working-class surroundings was through education. He became a voracious reader and classic overachiever: in high school, he was valedictorian, captain of the debate team, and student body president. He also made two other significant realizations in his youth: that he wanted to be a writer and that he was gay.

Nava left Sacramento to attend Colorado College on a full academic scholarship, and following graduation spent a year in Argentina on a fellowship. He then returned to California, where he has lived since, to earn his law degree at the Stanford University School of Law. In 1981, he became a Los Angeles deputy city attorney. Three years later, he left to become a research attorney for the California Court of Appeals.

Nava currently has a private practice in San Francisco, but he describes himself not as a lawyer who writes, but as a writer who also practices law. He began writing poetry at the age of fourteen and continued to write poems, some of which were published in small reviews, throughout college. While studying for his bar exams in his last year of law school, he was working an overnight shift at a jail and, in need of a break from studying, began to write a mystery. He continued to work on the book after he became a prosecutor and upon its completion sent an unsolicited manuscript to Alyson Publications, a small publisher specializing in gay and lesbian literature. Alyson published the novel, The Little Death, in 1986 and the second book in the series, Goldenboy, in 1988. How Town was published by Harper & Row in 1990 and The Hidden Law (HarperCollins) appeared in 1992. Nava has won four Lambda Literary Awards for his books. The Death of Friends (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, August 27, 1996) is Nava’s fifth Henry Rios mystery.

In his writing, Nava says, he tries “to depict the reality in which I live, which in California is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-sexual orientation. I live in a very rich world here, and I try to depict it with some veracity. That is one of my goals as a writer, to accurately paint a picture of my world.”