Daniel Olivas
| Daniel Olivas | |
|---|---|
| Born | Daniel Anthony Olivas April 8, 1959 Los Angeles, California |
| Occupation | Author; Attorney |
| Nationality | USA |
| Ethnicity | Chicano |
Daniel Olivas (born April 8, 1959 in Los Angeles, California) is a United States author and attorney.
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 law degree from the University of California at Los Angeles.
As a law student at UCLA, Olivas was elected co-chair of La Raza Law Students Association (1982–1983), and served as editor-in-chief of the Chicano Law Review (1983–1984). He met a fellow law student, Susan Formaker, during their first year at UCLA. They married in 1986 in a Jewish ceremony at Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles. In 1988, Olivas converted to Judaism within the Reform tradition. They settled in the San Fernando Valley and had their only child, Benjamin, in 1990.
Olivas has practiced law with the California Department of Justice as a deputy and supervising deputy attorney general since 1990. Prior to 1990, he was in private practice with the now-defunct Heller Ehrman LLP. His wife is an administrative law judge. Their son received his bachelor's degree in Anthropology at UCLA.
Before becoming a fiction writer, Olivas authored numerous 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 (not to be confused with the Los Angeles-based publisher of the same name), 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. The book received modest response and mixed praise including a review in the online journal, Critique Magazine, where book critic Christina Gosnell noted: "This novel is invaluable in its own right. Mr. Olivas is a writer who believed in it enough to tell it, and many readers can be enriched by his noble effort. But Mr. Olivas inadvertently starched the edges of this story, stiffening the softness of a passion obviously true, and consequently obscured the brilliance of all love stories: the love." Yet, critic Chris Mansel, writing for The Muse Apprentice Guild, sang the novella's praises: "What a loving and sweet study is The Courtship of María Rivera Peña. Every page you can imagine on the screen, lit beautifully and acted as well as the story was written. Daniel A. Olivas writes with the confidence and grace of a village storyteller entrusted to keep the stories alive. We are taken step by step through the history of a marriage, a relationship and a way living unknown to most. This is a story that deserves your attention."
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