Pulitzer Prize-winning Fil-Am journalist dies at 58 in Oregon

Alex Tizon died in his sleep of natural causes.

SAN FRANCISCO — University of Oregon professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Alex Tizon, 58, has died, according to the university’s School of Journalism and Communication. A medical examiner says Tizon died in his sleep of natural causes in his Eugene, Oregon home.

In 1997 Tizon, along with two other Seattle Times reporters, won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for their five-part series exposing corruption and mismanagement at the Federal Indian Housing Program.

Tizon taught reporting and interviewing at the UO since 2011. He recently returned to the U.S. from a Knight International Journalism Fellowship in the Philippines, where he studied government efforts to alleviate poverty in its five most impoverished provinces, according to Molleda.

Tizon was a frequent contributor to the The Atlantic – his latest work, “In the land of missing persons: 2 families, 2 bodies and a vast Alaska wilderness,” was published in December 2016.

Tizon came to the United States at five years old. Later, he chronicled his experiences and struggles as an Asian-American man in a 2014 memoir, “Big Little Man: The Search for My Asian Self.” The book won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Work-In-Progress Award in 2011.

He is survived by his wife, Melissa, two daughters, Dylan, 26, and Maya, 17, as well as eight siblings.