Phillip Vega
Award-winning author. Long Island roots. Five novels and counting.
In My Own Words
Six Weeks, Eight Hundred Pages
One rainy afternoon in August 2015, the images started playing. I had never planned to write a word. Five novels later, here is how it happened.
I grew up in Stony Brook, New York, in a house where two worlds sat at the same table every night. My mother was a physician who immigrated from the Dominican Republic and built a career here from nothing. My father served as Commissioner of the Human Rights Division for the U.S. federal government, a man who spent his career making sure people got treated fairly, and who I lost when I was thirteen.
That’s young to lose a father. It’s also, I’ve come to realize, about the age a person starts deciding what kind of adult they’re going to become. I went to a small private school on Long Island that doesn’t get named in interviews, but if you’ve read any of my five novels, you’ve been there. It shows up quietly in every one of them, a thread only I fully see.
I didn’t set out to be a novelist. Writing wasn’t on my roadmap, or even on a dream board. I got a business degree as an adult, built a career in software sales, and got married in 1993. Then in August 2015 I started writing. Six weeks and eight hundred pages later, I had the rough framework of what became Last Exit to Montauk. Four more novels have followed.
My books split into two families. Last Exit to Montauk, The Captain and the Queen, and Searching for Sarah are Long Island stories: warm, place-rooted, about the people who raised me and the town that shaped me. Fury in Her Eyes and Death in Utopia are darker, procedural, the kind of mystery that keeps you up later than you meant to stay. Every protagonist across all five carries the same heritage I do, Dominican and Puerto Rican, because that’s the lens I know how to see the world through.
Seventeen awards and honors across the five books now, which still catches me off guard every time I say it out loud. Last Exit to Montauk won the Manhattan Book Awards in 2020. Searching for Sarah took a FAPA President’s Book Award Gold in 2021. Fury in Her Eyes won the 2025 Independent Press Award for Multicultural Fiction.
Every novel has its own original song too, a way of telling the story twice: once on the page, once out loud. Last Exit to Montauk is the first to get a full music video.
If you’re an agent, a producer, or a journalist, I retain film, television, streaming, audiobook, and foreign rights across the full catalog, and I’d like to hear from you. If you’re a reader, thank you for being here. There’s a lot more story left to tell.