Featured July 10, 2004, and March 17, 2007

Geronimo Tagatac's father was a Filipino from the northwest area of Luzon in the Philippines. His mother was a Russian Jew living in New York when the couple met. Tagatac's father ended up raising the children alone, in farmworker houses among mostly Filipino immigrant men. His father then married a Cajun from Happy Jack, Louisiana and four more siblings were born.

"I began writing short stories as a way to make sense of my life. By the time I was in my forties, I had been a farmworker, cannery warehouseman, kitchenworker, a homeless college dropout, coffeehouse folksinger, special forces soldier in the Vietnam War, a ski bum, rock climbing bum, a short order cook, college teacher, martial arts instructor, and a modern and jazz dancer. Ten years ago, I found myself in a respectable white-collar job, wandering through the day with all of these strange images, people's voices and stories in my head that refused to go away. So I began to write, to let those pictures flow onto paper. And then everything seemed to fall into place, to have a purpose."

Geronimo Tagatac earned a BA and MA in history from San Jose State in California and has completed PhD work in political science at the University of California in Davis. During that time he received a scholarship that enabled him to study Mandarin Chinese, which led to living for three yeas in Taiwan then Hong Kong. In the 1980s, he returned to Davis, where he worked in the California State Legislature's Assembly Office of Research. After seven years in San Francisco and one year in Fremont, he was offered a job in Salem, Oregon. He is currently employed as a Business System Integration Analyst for the State of Oregon. 

Tagatac received an Oregon Literary Fellowship in 1997 and a Fishtrap Fellowship. He has since taught short fiction, poetry, nonfiction, songwriting, publishing, magical realism and "Difficult Characters in Fiction" at the 2001 and 2003 Fishtrap summer writers' conference.

Geronimo Tagatac's first book-length collection of short fiction, The Weight of the Sun, will be published in 2005 by Portland State University's Ooligan Press.

Tagatac is an avid traveler, runner, weight trainer and reader. "I like talking about politics, current events, film, literature and music. I have a thing for smoky dives and greasy spoon restaurants. I like to go out dancing."