Lysley Tenorio

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Lysley Tenorio is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California and the author of the novel The Son of Good Fortune (HarperCollins, 2020), winner of the New American Voices Award, and the story collection Monstress (HarperCollins, 2012), named a book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. 

During his fellowship, Tenorio is researching and writing a novel, “The Children Go.” The novel deals with the Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) phenomenon and follows Faustina Go, a Filipino woman whose seven children work as OFWs across the globe, one on each continent.

A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Tenorio is the recipient of a Bogliasco Foundation fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Whiting Award, as well as residencies from the James Merrill House, MacDowell, and Yaddo. His stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Ploughshares, and Zoetrope: All-Story and have been adapted for the stage by American Conservatory Theater, in San Francisco, and Ma-Yi Theater Company, in New York City. Tenorio was a 2021 finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize.