In August 2015, Willamette Writers’s literary journal, The Timberline Review launched its first issue at the Willamette Writers Conference. To acknowledge an exceptional piece of writing from that first issue, the editors created “The Timberline Prize” and awarded it to Michigan writer Robert Vivian, for his dervish essay, Read to You.

In 2016, the editors chose to recognize Rick Attig for his essay about family and

loss, Family Trees, which appeared in the Winter/Spring 2016 issue.

This year, we award The Timberline Prize to Geronimo Tagatac, in recognition of his story, The Summer of the Aswang, from the Summer/Fall 2017 issue.

Geronimo Tagatac is the son of a Filipino-immigrant father and a Russian-Jewish mother. His life has taken an arc from fieldhand to Special Forces demolition sergeant in Vietnam to modern dancer to civil servant and literary writer. A collection of his short fiction, The Weight of the Sun, was published in 2006 by Ooligan Press. He lives in Salem, Oregon.