Michael Nava Books in Order

If you want to meet Henry Rios from the beginning: Lay Your Sleeping Head / The Little Death → Goldenboy → Howtown → The Hidden Law
If you want the revised Henry Rios books first: Lay Your Sleeping Head / The Little Death → Carved in Bone → Lies With Man
If you want Michael Nava outside crime fiction: The City of Palaces → Street People
If you want nonfiction first: Created Equal

Michael Nava was born in Stockton, California, in 1954 and grew up in Gardenland, a working-class Mexican neighborhood in Sacramento. That place stayed with him. You can feel it in the way he writes about class, family, faith, and the uneasy mix of pride and pressure that comes with trying to make a life on your own terms.

He started writing when he was 12.

That was also around the time he understood he was gay, which matters because so much of his work is about people learning how to name themselves in a world that would rather do the naming for them. Nava was the first person in his family to go to college. He studied history at Colorado College, but he was pulled just as strongly toward literature and creative writing.

After graduating in 1976, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and spent time in Madrid and Buenos Aires working on translations of Rubén Darío. He returned to the United States, considered graduate study, and then chose law school instead, earning his J.D. from Stanford in 1981. The legal path gave him a profession, but writing never really left the picture.

He worked as a deputy city attorney in Los Angeles, later practiced appellate law, and went on to serve as a judicial attorney in California's court system, including on the staff of the California Supreme Court. That experience gave his fiction its special texture. The courtroom scenes feel lived in, but so do the quieter parts, the compromises, the moral wear and tear, the sense that law can be both a tool for justice and a machine that grinds people down.

That tension became the heart of Henry Rios.

Nava began publishing the Henry Rios novels in the 1980s, starting with The Little Death, later reworked as Lay Your Sleeping Head. Henry is a gay Latino criminal defense lawyer, and the books follow him through California during years marked by homophobia, police hostility, and the AIDS crisis. Readers often come for the mystery plots and stay for the emotional truth. Goldenboy, The Death of Friends, and Rag and Bone are especially admired for the way they combine suspense with grief, desire, family history, and a plainspoken belief that justice still matters, even when the system fails.

Nava did not stay in one lane. With Robert Dawidoff, he wrote Created Equal, a nonfiction argument for why gay rights belong at the center of American civic life. He also turned to historical fiction with The City of Palaces, set in Mexico before the Revolution, and showed he could handle a much broader canvas without losing his eye for intimate human conflict. Even the short Street People carries his usual concerns about outsiders, danger, and the meaning of family.

A lot of Nava's work is about people trying to live honestly inside systems built to punish them for it. He writes about lawyers, lovers, working people, runaways, and families that wound each other and still matter. California is everywhere in the books. So are Mexico, memory, and the long afterlife of history.

He later returned to Henry Rios with revised editions and new installments, and he also founded Persigo Press to help bring work by LGBTQ writers and writers of color into print. Nava lives in Daly City, California, with his husband, George Herzog.