Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series

Alex Tizon (1959-2017) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who built a career telling the stories of people at the margins. The underdogs. The forgotten ones. Everyday people. Immigrants, criminals, and folks on the fringe. Tizon believed that every human had a story to tell; they only needed to be invited to share it. In Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins, Tizon’s friend and former colleague, Sam Howe Verhovek, brought his stories together in a deeply human collection of work. Tizon had a knack for illuminating the stories of people typically hidden from view. From UFO-tracking outliers to immigrants from Cambodia and Laos, Verhovek brought such tales together to paint a rich and empathetic picture of humanity. Included is one of Tizon’s most important and controversial stories, which appeared on the cover of The Atlantic just months after his death in 2017. “My Family’s Slave” offered a painful and personal account of Eudocia “Lola” Tomas Polido, the enslaved woman who raised him and his sib