Randy Ribay is an American writer of middle grade and young adult fiction. Ribay has won the 2019 Freeman Award from the National Consortium for Teaching About Asia and was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Awards for Young People's Literature category for his book Patron Saints of Nothing.[1]
Ribay teaches high school English in San Francisco, CA.[3]
He began his writing career by writing poetry but broke into the prose writing scene by participating in Pitch Slam at a Writer's Digest annual conference.[2][4]
The book is a coming-of-age story about Jay Reguero, a Filipino-American boy of high school age. Reguero travels to the Philippines to find out the story behind a cousin killed in an ongoing drug war based on the nonfictional drug war established by Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte. Once there, he must reevaluate his heritage and his status as a Filipino-American outsider.[9][4]
Ribay considered the book to be dedicated to the "hyphenated", referring to his Filipino-American heritage.[9]