Michael Manosca writes about the people others are uneasy mentioning — the ones who are gay, or don't quite fit, or carry some small difference that makes a stranger smile and keep walking. He writes them because he has been one of them, and because somewhere along the way he learned the truth his books keep circling back to: family is not always the people you are born to. It is whoever steps up and says I want you here.

Every novel he has written grows from someone real — a friend, a stranger, a version of himself, a man he loved. He doesn't write to be an author. He writes so that one person, somewhere, might open a book and find themselves inside it — and understand that for all the ways we talk ourselves into being alone, almost none of us truly wants to be.

He came to fiction by way of the arts, studying in Chicago, and it shows in how he builds a scene: visually, patiently, trusting a small gesture to carry the weight. He lives along the western coast of the United States and has written more than a dozen novels, with another always underway.