Daniel Anthony Olivas (born April 8, 1959, in Los Angeles, California) is an American author and attorney. Biography 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. 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. Writing 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." 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." In a review published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, the novelist Michael Nava noted, in part: