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Michael Angel Nava (born September 16, 1954 in Stockton, California) is an attorney and writer.

He is a third-generation Californian of Mexican descent. He was born and raised in Sacramento. He was the first member of his family to attend college, graduating with honors from the Colorado College in 1976. He received his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1981.

In 2002, he was also awarded an honorary degree as a Doctor of Humane Arts from the Colorado College in recognition of his literary achievements.

He began his legal career as a trial lawyer in the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office where he prosecuted criminal cases and did approximately 50 jury trials.

He was an associate at the appellate boutique firm of Horvitz and Levy before becoming a judicial staff attorney for the Honorable Arleigh Woods, the first female African-American appellate court justice in California. He served in that capacity from 1986 to 1995. Among the notable cases he worked on was Jasperson v. Jessica’s Nail Clinic, the first published decision to uphold an HIV/AIDS anti-discrimination statute.

After Justice Wood’s retirement, Nava returned to his native Northern California, settling in San Francisco In 1999, he joined the staff of the California Supreme Court and since 2004 he has been a judicial attorney for Justice Carlos R. Moreno, only the third Latino to sit on the California high court. Justice Moreno was also recently considered for the United States Supreme Court seat that went to Justice Sonia Sotomayer.

Nava began writing what would become his first novel — The Little Death — while in law school. Published in 1986, it was the first of seven novels featuring a gay Latino criminal defense lawyer named Henry Rios, based in Los Angeles. The six books that followed — Goldenboy (1988), How Town (1990), The Hidden Law (1992), The Death of Friends (1996), The Burning Plain (1998) and the final volume Rag and Bone (2000) — were published to increasing praise from mainstream publications that did not ordinarily review the works of gay and lesbian writers. His novels were awarded six Lambda Literary Awards and he was ultimately awarded the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award for Gay and Lesbian literature from the Publishing Triangle, a GLBT professional group within the publishing industry.

Despite the fact that he has not published a work of fiction since 2000, his novels continue to be the subject of scholarly discussion about gay and Latino/a writers. In an interview in the Latino/a literary blog, La Bloga, he revealed that he has been at work on an historical novel set around the time of Mexican Revolution in Mexico and Arizona tentatively entitled "The Children of Eve." He is also co-author of the book "Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America."

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Michael Nava", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0