Randy Ribay writes young-adult fiction that takes Filipino-American teenagers seriously as moral agents. His third novel, Patron Saints of Nothing (2019), was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, and it follows a Filipino-American high-schooler who travels to the Philippines to investigate the death of a cousin killed in Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs. The book was also a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize.

Born in the Philippines and raised in the American Midwest and Colorado, Ribay came to fiction the slow way, writing around a full-time job. He has long taught high-school English in the San Francisco Bay Area, and told the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association that he wrote much of his work in the early mornings before class. That double life, teacher and novelist, runs through books aimed squarely at the readers he sees every day.

His earlier novels staked out the territory. An Infinite Number of Parallel Universes (2015) and After the Shot Drops (2018), the latter set on the basketball courts of Philadelphia, are about friendship, class, and the pressure young men carry. Both drew on his years in classrooms, where he watched how rarely boys like his characters got to be the heroes of their own stories, and Patron Saints of Nothing turned the same attention toward the Philippines and the question of how much of a homeland a diaspora kid can claim.

His most ambitious book is the most recent. Everything We Never Had (2024) follows four generations of Filipino-American men, from a farmworker in 1930s California to a teenager in pandemic-era Philadelphia, tracing inheritance, silence, and masculinity down a single family line. He told Publishers Weekly that the book grew out of his own questions about fatherhood and what gets passed between generations.

His recurring subjects are Filipino identity and the diaspora, justice, and the inner lives of boys who are rarely written with this much care. He has written for younger franchises too, including Avatar tie-in novels, but the realist books are where his reputation sits. For a list of living Filipino authors writing for the young, Ribay is one of the most decorated, and one of the most widely taught.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.