Mae Respicio writes warm, realistic middle-grade fiction that puts Filipino-American kids and their families at the center of the story. Her debut, The House That Lou Built (2018), received an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Honor and was named a best book of the year by NPR and Kirkus, a strong arrival for a first novel, and she has built a growing shelf of books for young readers since.

The book follows Lou Bulosan-Nelson, a girl who dreams of building a hundred-square-foot tiny house on land she inherited from her late father, and who learns along the way what home and family actually mean. The tiny house is also a way into grief and what a parent leaves behind. Respicio has said that growing up she never saw herself in the books she read, and that being Filipina American is one of the main lenses through which she sees the world and writes.

She has built steadily on that debut, always in the realistic register, close to the texture of a Filipino-American childhood. Any Day With You (2020) follows a girl and her great-grandfather in Los Angeles; How to Win a Slime War (2021) centers a Filipino-American boy and his family's market in Sacramento; and her 2024 novel-in-verse Isabel in Bloom follows a girl who moves from the Philippines to San Francisco and finds belonging through a school garden and a cooking club.

Respicio grew up in a large extended Filipino-American family in Northern California, and as a child danced in a Filipino folk-dance troupe, the kind of detail that surfaces, transformed, in her books. Before her novels she held a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices fellowship and writing residencies at Hedgebrook and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, marks of a writer who took the long road into children's books.

Her recurring subjects are Filipino-American family and heritage, the bonds between generations, food, and the ordinary business of figuring out where you belong, all written with a gentleness aimed squarely at readers between about eight and twelve. For a list of living Filipino authors, Respicio is the one writing the youngest readers their own mirrors.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.