1. Daniel Olivas was raised near downtown Los Angeles, the middle of five children and the grandson of Mexican immigrants.
16 Facts About Daniel Olivas
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Daniel Olivas met fellow law student, Susan Formaker at UCLA and they married in 1986.
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Daniel 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.
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Daniel Olivas 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.
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Daniel Olivas's first book was a novella, The Courtship of Maria Rivera Pena, which was published by a small and now-defunct Pennsylvania-based press, Silver Lake Publishing in 2000 and is out of print.
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In September 2017, Daniel Olivas published another collection, The King of Lighting Fixtures.
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In February 2022, Daniel Olivas published the collection, How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories.
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Daniel Olivas's work is surreal, dystopian, critical, and introspective, ultimately moving into contemporary political rhetoric.
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On May 8,2024, after the novel's publication, NPR's Code Switch podcast ran an interview with Daniel Olivas regarding his novel where he discussed the anti-immigrant political rhetoric of the 2020 midterm elections that inspired him to write the book.
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Daniel Olivas edited Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, where he brought together sixty years of Los Angeles fiction by Latino writers.
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In 2016, Tia 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.
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In 2023, Daniel 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.
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In November 2017, Daniel Olivas published his first book of poems, Crossing the Border: Collected Poems.
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Daniel Olivas wrote his first full-length play Waiting for Godinez in 2019.
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Daniel Olivas explained that he was inspired both by Samuel Beckett's iconic Waiting for Godot and the absurd, anti-immigrant policies of the federal government.
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In 2020 Daniel Olivas was selected for Circle X Theatre Co.