Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins

by Alex Tizon, Sam Howe Verhovek

“Somewhere in the tangle of the subject’s burden and the subject’s desire is your story.” —Alex Tizon  Every human being has an epic story. The late Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Alex Tizon told the epic stories of marginalized people—from lonely immigrants struggling to forge a new American identity to a high school custodian who penned a New Yorker short story. Edited by Tizon’s friend and former colleague Sam Howe Verhovek, Invisible People collects the best of Tizon’s rich, empathetic accounts—including “My Family’s Slave,” the Atlantic magazine cover story about the woman who raised him and his siblings under conditions that amounted to indentured servitude. Mining his Filipino American background, Tizon tells the stories of immigrants from Cambodia and Laos. He gives a fascinating account of the Beltway sniper and insightful profiles of Surfers for Jesus and a man who tracks UFOs. His articles—many originally published in the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times— are brimming with enlightening details about people who existed outside the mainstream’s field of vision.  In their introductions to Tizon’s pieces, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, Atlantic  magazine editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize winners Kim Murphy and Jacqui Banaszynski, and others salute Tizon’s respect for his subjects and the beauty and brilliance of his writing. Invisible People is a loving tribute to a journalist whose search for his own identity prompted him to chronicle the lives of others.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Journalism, Book Club

248 pages, Hardcover

Published November 22, 2019

About the author

Alex Tizon was an American author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

Reviews

[Jess Estrada]

I think I googled every person Alex writes about in this posthumous collection of his works. I loved the introductions of each article by his colleagues. They really helped paint a picture of how Alex approached his work and each of his subjects. We lost a phenomenal, compelling, beloved writer way too soon. I’ll be looking up as much of his other work as I can get my hands on!

[Jocelyn]

Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins (2019), by Alex Tizon and edited by Sam Howe Verhovek, was selected, along with Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, for the AUPresses’ Community Read, a program designed to encourage thoughtful dialogue about equity and inclusion. Tizon, who passed away in 2017, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and this book pulls together his profiles of the marginalized--often immigrants, individuals from Indigenous communities, and outsiders. The book isn’t marketed as explicitly about racism, but race, ethnicity, and the perils of navigating a white supremacist society, thread through the collection. Included are the stories of Cambodian refugees, the only Muslim family in a Wyoming town in days immediately following 9/11, a family of African-American Katrina refugees in a mostly white Alaskan town, and the last chief of the Nisqually tribe, whose name was cleared 150 years after his execution. The collection also includes My Family’s Slave, Tizon’s award-winning Atlantic article about Lola, the woman who raised the Filipino-American Tizon and his siblings in conditions that amounted to modern-day slavery. Tizon is a compelling, insightful, and compassionate writer with a keen eye for detail and the book is hard to put down.

[Marika]

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Alex Tizon writes gives voice to the disenfranchised, the left behind, and yes, the enslaved. The book is composed of the many articles that Tizon originally wrote for the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times.
From the Beltway sniper, to Surfers for Jesus, to the man who tracks UFOs, Tizon introduces readers to people on the so called fringe that they might not be aware of.
Readers will wonder if the fact that his family kept a peasant woman (Eudoica) as a household slave for over 56 years was the impetus for this book. The article that he wrote is "My Family's Slave" and it's up to the reader to decide how much is cultural and how much is for personal advantage.

The author passed away in March, 2017.

[Melody]

Tizon had a natural talent for telling us about the ordinary in an extraordinary way. In this collection, he elevates the voices of otherwise invisible people - Cambodians, cab drivers, Native Americans, prisoners, Muslims in Wyoming after 9/11, old ladies at truck stops, to name a few.

Tizon loathed journalistic conventions and formulas and while he never neglected to report the facts, his writing is gentle, conversational, and he loads his stories with physical descriptions and verbs that just pop. I don’t know what questions he asked to get the quotes he got sometimes, but you can just tell his subjects felt seen, heard, and understood, as they deserved to be.

[Ari B]

Alex Tizon is such an incredible storyteller. He showed us how he saw the world and the people he wrote about in such unique ways. He described every person as a normal person but a hero at the same time, and showed a great appreciation for each person he spoke to and shared the snippets of their lives that made them who they were with such justice. I can't say I know much about what it takes to be a "good journalist" but to me it seems like Alex had a gift for sharing stories and he chose so many important ones to share. ❤️

[Jolene]

This book is a compilation of some of Tizon’s most memorable works as a journalist. I’ll admit I didn’t know who he was, but I admire his work as a writer and journalist. The stories in this book are special. They shed light into the everyday lives of the people who we least expect to see stories about. I love that Tizon was an advocate for the marginalized. His work truly shows his heart for people.

[Lindsey Sullivan]

I really liked this a lot!! Essentially a compilation of articles by a late Seattle journalist about folks on the margins. Some of the topics interested me more than others — like the very first article about his family’s slave was riveting !! I was very into this in the beginning and lost a bit of steam but overall very beautiful and a cool format.

[Pearse Anderson]

A good collection of a good journalist's work. I preferred his longform Atlantic pieces collected here, but he does other coverage well and checks tons of Nieman boxes. Was happy with getting a 2020 ARC release, too!

[Patty]

A really wonderful collection of pieces about all sorts of people. Tizon brings out the humanity and complexity of each and every one of them, making them visible and real. I wish Alex Tizon were still alive and writing more pieces like these.

[Monty]

This is an excellent tribute to a remarkable journalist. Each column reprinted in the book is introduced by other journalists who who worked with him and knew him well. Each one painted a picture of how special Alex Tizon was. This was a great read for me.

[Elizabeth Vilchis]

This collection of articles is so very thoughtful and compassionate. What a shame he’s gone too soon. May his words encourage action in others in the future. Tizón really has an eye for seeing the epic, heroic, and fantastic in those who are overlooked by society on a daily basis.

[Susan]

This book is a collection of feature stories by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.
Each story is about a person or a group of people who are not usually given much attention. These are journalistic type stories, non-fiction. They are compelling.

[Aaron White]

A compilation of the journalist Tizon’s stories, focusing on people the media normally ignores. The immigrant, the refugee, the orphan, indigenous, pacifists, eccentrics, Jesus-loving surfers. Tizon saw, and wrote about, the people who were invisible to everyone else.

[Luke Matheson]

What an amazing collection of unique stories by a journalist whose ability to capture the margins of our society is incredible to me. I love this type of long-form journalistic writing, and I will be seeking it out more in the future.

[Amanda Anthony]

This was a fantastic collection of feature pieces that covered topics as diverse as murder, refugees, and UFOs. Mostly written between 1994 and 2004, I'd say - it would have been interesting if there had been post-scripts about what happened to the people.

[Roland]

Very good. I learned a lot.

[Liz]

Every human has a story.

[Jennifer]

Beautiful and powerful writing. Interesting and usual stories that really help broaden one’s perspective.

[Kristin]

I loved this collection. A powerhouse of a tribute to a deeply empathetic reporter and human.

[Jason Chiang]

I liked the format of this book, that it is a collection of notable articles written by the author, and collected and commented on by his former coworkers posthumously. He seems like a very good journalist, one that we really need more of, and it's sad that he died relatively early.

[Marie Pattison Frey]

The short stories were interesting especially since I live in the Seattle area. I too am always interested in the stories of day to day people. As one colleague wrote in a prologue to one of the stories
“If Alex covered horse racing, he wanted to know about the long shots, the has been, and the never were’s; if he covered Wall Street, .... he’d be more interested in the people who lost their shirts.....”