Lysley Tenorio writes fiction about Filipino immigrants, the undocumented, and the perpetual outsider, with a mix of humor, surrealism, and heartbreak that is all his own. Born in Olongapo City in 1972 and brought to the United States as an infant, he grew up in the heavily Filipino neighborhood of Mira Mesa in San Diego, and now teaches in the creative writing program at Saint Mary's College of California and lives in San Francisco.

His debut story collection, Monstress (2012), gathers eight stories of first-generation Filipinos and cultural misfits, a fading Manila film director chasing one last shot at Hollywood, aging men in San Francisco's International Hotel, cousins plotting revenge on the Beatles. Named a book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, with a title story that was a National Magazine Award finalist, it announced a writer drawn to people stranded between cultures and eras.

His novel, The Son of Good Fortune (2020), follows nineteen-year-old Excel and his mother Maxima, a washed-up Filipino action-movie star turned online scammer, as they live tago ng tago, hiding and hiding, as undocumented immigrants in a California town. Tenorio has observed that documented Americans have the privilege to aspire to mediocrity, while characters like Excel just want to walk down the street without fear. The book won the New American Voices Award, was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and is being developed for television by Riz Ahmed and Lulu Wang.

Few writers of his generation have been so consistently funded to do the work. He has won a Whiting Award and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute fellowship at Harvard, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Zoetrope, and Ploughshares, and have been staged for the theater in San Francisco and New York.

His recurring subjects are the Filipino immigrant experience, undocumented life and its particular fears, family, and the outsiders that mainstream stories pass over, often lit by an unexpected streak of pop culture and comedy. For a list of living Filipino authors, Tenorio is among the most quietly decorated, one of the most careful chroniclers of undocumented Filipino life in American fiction.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.