Matt de la Peña Books in Order

Matt de la Peña grew up in National City, California, a border community in San Diego County that shows up again and again in his work. He has spoken often about being raised in a mixed family, with a Mexican father and a white mother, and about learning early how class, place, and identity can shape the way a kid moves through the world.

For a long time, books were not the plan.

Basketball was. De la Peña went to the University of the Pacific on a full scholarship, and college turned out to be the place where reading finally clicked for him. A professor handed him The Color Purple, and he has said that books like that opened up a new emotional and intellectual life, one that made writing feel possible.

He has also talked about being a kid who did not always see reading as something meant for him. That matters when you look at the books he later wrote. Again and again, he returns to young people who feel unseen, mislabeled, or shut out of spaces that are supposed to help them grow.

After Pacific, he earned an MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University and started writing the kind of stories he wished he had found earlier. His debut novel, Ball Don't Lie, follows a gifted basketball player in foster care. It set the tone for a lot of what came next, working-class settings, sharp dialogue, emotional pressure, and a refusal to flatten anyone into a type.

He also spent time working in a group home in San Jose, and that experience stayed with him. He has said the teens he met there were often described only by their trouble, even though many of them had enormous heart. You can feel that understanding in the novels that followed.

He kept returning to kids who feel split between worlds.

In Mexican WhiteBoy, a teenage pitcher wrestles with race, family, and belonging during a summer in National City. We Were Here follows a boy from a group home on a reckless trip toward the Mexican border, while I Will Save You tracks another hurting teenager trying to hold himself together. Readers often come to these books for the momentum, but they stay for the voice, the humor, and the way de la Peña makes guarded characters feel fully human.

He has also stretched into other kinds of storytelling. The Living and The Hunted turn disaster and survival into fast, tense thrillers. Superman: Dawnbreaker brings his interest in outsiders and moral choices to a young Clark Kent story, without losing sight of the pressures faced by the people around him.

His picture books reach younger readers, but they carry many of the same concerns. A Nation's Hope looks at Joe Louis and the history surrounding a single boxing match. Last Stop on Market Street won the Newbery Medal in 2016, and books like Love, Carmela Full of Wishes, Milo Imagines the World, and Patchwork show how well he can write about tenderness, imagination, public space, and the quiet dignity of ordinary lives.

De la Peña has also been part of larger conversations about access to books and censorship. In 2016, he received the NCTE Intellectual Freedom Award, a fitting honor for a writer who keeps insisting that kids from every kind of neighborhood deserve stories that see them clearly.

These days, he teaches creative writing at San Diego State University and continues to visit schools and colleges around the country. That feels right. His books are serious about young people, curious about the world they inherit, and always looking for the grace inside places other writers might pass by.