I am an author in Los Angeles, California. By day, I live an anonymous life and work full-time in marketing. By night, I write novels under the pen name Chicho Lily.

My books are honest and intense. They deal with real-life themes and real-world situations. Readers praise my stories for being authentic enough to seem as though they actually happened. (And perhaps some of them did…)

My writing style is informed by authors like Charles Bowden, William Langewiesche, Charles Bukowski, Joan Didion, John Steinbeck, John Fante, Laura Hillenbrand, VS Naipaul, Mark Arax, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

I am heavily influenced by Los Angeles itself, and the City of Angels is the setting for virtually all my stories. I am not inspired by the glitz of Hollywood or Beverly Hills, though. Instead, I write about life in LA’s urban core neighborhoods like Mid-City, the Miracle Mile, and Koreatown, as well as its blue-collar suburbs in places like the San Gabriel Valley. I am also moved by the lives of working-class Californians living in the state’s expansive Central Valley.

I speak Spanish fluently and Cantonese semi-fluently, so I find inspiration in those languages and the Southern California immigrant cultures that nurture them, too.

Regarding my pen name: it was taken from a specific spot along 8th Street in central Los Angeles between South Hauser Boulevard to the east and South Fairfax Avenue to the west. Go there, walk that stretch of 8th Street, and if you are extremely attentive, you will find ‘Chicho Lily’ hiding in plain sight. If you’re able to find it, take a picture and send it to me.

And if you go to just the right spot on 8th Street at just the right time of night, you’ll find me walking my dog and pondering my next story…

In the meantime, click around this website to read more about the books I have written. To purchase them, visit my Amazon author page.

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