Asian American Short Story Writers: An A-to-Z Guide

Rocío G. Davis

Peter Bacho was born in Seattle in 1950. His father had immigrated to the United States in 1923, and returned to the Philippines to marry his mother in 1949. The family was migratory until 1954, after which his father divided his time between summers working in Alaskan canneries and a job in the city. Bacho grew up in the Central District in Seattle, mainly an African American and Filipino neighborhood at the time. He graduated summa cum laude from Seattle University in 1971, earned a law degree from the University of Washington in 1974, became a City of Seattle Prosecutor in 1985, and a Staff Attorney, U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals from 1989 to 1990. In 1988, Bacho was Assistant Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department of the University of Washington and Visiting Professor in English and History at the University of California at Irvine in 1994-1995. He lives in Tacoma where he teaches at the University of Washington and is on the editorial board of the Tacoma News Tribune.

Bacho has trained in martial arts and American boxing for over thirty years, and works out in his free time. He says that he fights and writes to keep a connection with his forefathers. An important aspect of his creative imagination lies in his understanding of the generation of immigrants that had come before him, and he feels fortunate to have known many of the heroic protagonists of early Filipino American history, notably Chris Mensalvas, the “Jose” in Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart.

Bacho's first novel, Cebu (1992), won the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation. His second book, Dark Blue Suit and Other Stories, won a Washington State Governor's Writers Award and the Murray Morgan

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