Reno Ursal

Finalist in the 2020 Next Generation Indie Book Awards in the Paranormal Category!

Reno Ursal, author of The Bathala Series, grew up in Rogers City, Michigan and received a B.A. in English from The University of Michigan. The son of Filipino immigrants who worked in the small Northern Michigan town as doctors, Reno found refuge in reading English classics written by Shakespeare, Jules Verne, C.S. Lewis and Mark Twain. At Michigan, he became exposed to more authors like Maxine Hong Kingston, Peter Bacho and Amy Tan. While his English classes Enlightened his literary repertoire, he was a fixture in Ann Arbor & Detroit at nightclubs and on the radio as a mixshow deejay and on-air radio personality. In 1996, he received the U-M Lifetime Achievement Award for his involvement in the Filipino American & Asian Pacific American community for his work with Fil-Am and Hmong youth.

He moved to the SF Bay Area and worked for indie music label Classified Records before starting his family. He and his wife settled in Mountain House, California where he is the high school girls Varsity basketball coach.

He started writing The Bathala Series in Mountain House, inspired by his niece's life story. His Filipino American writer's voice is new in Young Adult paranormal fiction, a voice representing thousands of Filipinos living in the shadows of America. Knowing that the Fil-Am population is not a monolith, The Bathala Series combines the forgotten pre-Spanish history of the Philippines with modern-day elements of the Young Adult paranormal genre. Enlightenment is Book One in a series that exposes the beautiful folklore of the Philippines to YA readers.

"For his fantasy series opener, Ursal provides a banquet of cultural textures about the Philippines without sacrificing a brisk pace and smooth prose." -Kirkus Reviews