I was born in San Diego, California and grew up in nearby National City, hometown of serial killer Andrew Cunanan and the shooting location for Return of the Killer Tomatoes. Its crime rate earned it the nickname Nasty City. Much of this celebrity happened after I left the 9.1 square miles of National City, which I knew from the age of ten I would do. I wanted adventure, magic, and a daily sense of discovery—in other words, the stuff of fiction. In my early twenties, I moved to the Pacific Northwest where I settled in Seattle and worked in local government for over thirty years promoting environmental education. Yet the place where I grew up remains elemental to my make-up and nearly all my fiction occurs in a place very much like National City. I call it Kimball Park, an actual place in my hometown, named after the man who changed its name from the Mexico-bestowed Rancho de la Nación. Names, places, and identity all show up as themes in my work.
My childhood, which was neither idyllic nor traumatic, did come with the normal awkwardness and angst of growing up. Layered underneath was the gradual awakening to the fact of my brownness and how I began to perceive myself and how others perceived me. There was a subset to my otherness as a result of my skin color, and that was my mixed heritage—Filipino and Mexican raised to be American. Often, I felt that I didn’t fit neatly into any of these spaces, a sentiment shared by many of my fictional characters. Also, until recently, my characters rarely reflected this mixture that is me. I found it easier to assign them one or the other heritage, but rarely both.
Though I came to writing relatively late, I believe that in some hidden recess of my being, I had been writing since the fourth grade. As anyone who writes knows, writing is an imperative, a must-do-or-else visceral urge that if suppressed must eventually burst from its containment. That happened when I was nearly forty and while liberating, it added one more thing to an already fully obligated life.
Writing while working full-time and raising children meant jotting fragments on the bus commute to work, during lunch hours, and at the end of the day after the kids were in bed. But what is writing if not patience and persistence for words to slowly accumulate to paragraphs, then pages, and finally a book.
My first book, the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced was published in 2011, eighteen years after I began writing it. The novel explores the ties within family and how circumstances of birth, immigration, and assimilation tug at those ties. Antonya Nelson, one of my favorite writers, called me a “pitch-perfect prose stylist,” while the poet Rick Barot called the novel “a clarifying vision of post-immigration America.”
My second book, Hola and Goodbye is a collection of stories about three generations of a family, the first of which emigrated from Mexico in the years after the revolution. It was selected by Randall Kenan for the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman and published by Carolina Wren Press (now Blair Publishing) in 2016. It won an Independent Publishers Award for Best Regional Fiction and an International Latino Book Award for Best Latino Focused Fiction.
My third book Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories, which has been called a novel, a novel-in-stories, or just stories, was published in 2020. The book chronicles Angie’s burgeoning awareness of her personhood and her struggle to discover who she is and her place in the world as she learns lessons about winning and losing, belonging and not belonging, and about overcoming divisions caused by race, gender, or just a different way of walking through life. It won a Next Generation Indie Book Award for Multicultural Fiction and an International Latino Gold Medal Award for Best Collection of Short Stories. It was a finalist for an American Fiction Award for Multicultural Fiction, the Nancy Pearl Award, and the Washington State Book Award.
I’m honored and delighted to have my fourth book published by Regal House. It’s a novel titled Ofelia and Norma, which grew out of a story called “Strong Girls” in my collection Hola and Goodbye. In the novel, sisters Ofelia and Norma are disaffected by their twinness and go their separate ways in college to navigate alone the perils of an anti-large-body world in which one sister toys with disordered eating and the other is assaulted as part of a frat prank, a violation that together the sisters eventually take upon themselves to avenge. Told in two points of view and in two timelines that eventually merge, the structure reflects the fracture and the healing of the twins’ relationship.
Aside from these books, I have had dozens of essays, stories, and book reviews published in journals and anthologies, and I was invited through the Washington Center for the Book to record my work for the Library of Congress PALABRA Archive. Over the years my work has benefited from artist residencies at Anderson Center, Artsmith, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Mineral School, Ragdale, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. It has been funded by scholarships, fellowships, and grants from local, state, and private arts organizations.
In 2023 my husband and I moved to Málaga, Spain, and I left a vibrant and supportive writing community in Seattle, which I deeply miss. However, my new home offers me the adventure, magic, and daily sense of discovery I sought as a ten-year-old.
Regal House Publishing is delighted to bring you Donna Miscolta’s Ofelia and Norma in 2026.
