Ricardo Gómez grew up in Colombia and spent twenty years as a professor of information science at the University of Washington before settling in Port Townsend, on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. His fiction draws on both geographies: several novels trace Colombian families across generations and continents; others begin with the treaties and land seizures that Port Townsend's Victorian buildings were built to obscure.

Several of his novels center on people whose work is to manage what gets written down — archivists, translators, cartographers, copyists. What the official record preserves, what it omits, and what can only be recovered through other means runs through much of his work.

He writes in English and Spanish, treating each as a distinct voice rather than a translation of the other.