Former PCIJ fellow
wins Lukas Prize

Pulitzer Prize-winning Filipino-American journalist Alex Tizon, who did a one-year stint with the PCIJ as a fellow, has been named one of the recipients of the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Project Awards for exceptional non-fiction.

Tizon received the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award, which is given to “aid the completion of a significant work of nonfiction,” for his upcoming book Big Little Man: The Asian Male at the Dawn of the Asian Century. The Awards are co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

“Big Little Man will become a book that clearly transcends its deep investigative character in both the complexity of its analysis and the lyricism of its storytelling,” the judges wrote of Tizon’s work. “The project takes readers on a personal journey of self-discovery that is also a deep exploration of what it has meant to be a man of Asian descent in the Western world from the earliest days of Asian migration.”

In 2009, Tizon traveled to the Philippines as a Knight International Press fellow, working with the PCIJ as part of the Suriin ang Kahirapan project, a poverty audit of the five poorest provinces in the country. Some short pieces that he wrote about his trips for the project are available online (“An Investigative Homecoming“, “Pride and Poverty“, “Guns, Goons, and Gold“).

Tizon won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 as part of an investigative reporting team of the Seattle Times for its series of stories on widespread corruption in federal housing programs for Native Americans. He is now a professor at the University of Oregon.