Marisa de los Santos Books in Order

For the interconnected Cornelia Brown novels: Love Walked In → Belong to Me → I'll Be Your Blue Sky → Watch Us Shine
If you want a friendship-centered standalone: Falling Together
If you want family secrets and emotional fallout: The Precious One → I'd Give Anything
For middle grade readers: Saving Lucas Biggs → Connect the Stars

Marisa de los Santos was born in Baltimore and grew up in northern Virginia, in a life shaped by reading early and often. Books were not just background for her, they were the main event. She studied English at the University of Virginia, then went on to Sarah Lawrence College for an MFA and to the University of Houston for a PhD in literature and creative writing.

She came to publishing first as a poet.

Before the novels, there were poems in journals like Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Chelsea, and then her first collection, From the Bones Out, in 2000. She also received a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award and a Delaware Arts Council grant. That early path matters because you can still hear the poet's ear in her fiction: the careful rhythm, the attention to feeling, and the way a sentence can hold both wit and ache at the same time.

De los Santos has said she started with poetry because she loved the sound and texture of words. Fiction arrived later, when she found herself holding not just lines or images, but characters and a full story. That shift led to Love Walked In, her first novel, which became a bestseller and introduced Cornelia Brown, one of the central figures in her interconnected adult fiction.

She writes about people who want connection, even when they are bad at asking for it.

That shows up across Belong to Me, Falling Together, The Precious One, I'll Be Your Blue Sky, I'd Give Anything, and Watch Us Shine. Some of these books lean into romance, but even then the bigger pull is usually friendship, family, old hurt, and the long afterlife of secrets. Her settings often feel lived-in rather than glossy: Philadelphia, its suburbs, Delaware, Virginia, coffee shops, neighborhood streets, and family houses where difficult conversations finally have to happen.

Across those books, what stands out is the range within a recognizable emotional world. Falling Together turns a broken college friendship into a search through the past. The Precious One digs into the damage done by a vain, domineering father. I'll Be Your Blue Sky and Watch Us Shine add inheritance, memory, and hidden family history. Even when the plots grow complicated, her attention stays close to the emotional life of ordinary people.

She has also written for younger readers with her husband, David Teague. Their middle grade novels, Saving Lucas Biggs and Connect the Stars, carry over the same interest in loyalty, courage, and what it costs to do the right thing. One is a time-travel story about a girl trying to save her father, and the other follows two misfit teens at wilderness camp. Along the way, de los Santos also taught English at the University of Delaware, which fits neatly with the way books and language seem to sit at the center of her life.

These days she lives in Wilmington, Delaware, with her family. The through line in her work is pretty steady: a poet's care for language, a novelist's feel for relationships, and a real curiosity about how people fail each other, forgive each other, and keep trying. There is warmth in that, but also room for grief, jealousy, and disappointment.