Emil Guillermo is an American print and broadcast journalist, commentator and humorist. His column, "Emil Amok", appeared for more than 14 years in '' AsianWeek''—at one time, the most widely read and largest circulating

Asian American Asian Americans are Americans of Asian ancestry (including naturalized Americans who are immigrants from specific regions in Asia and descendants of such immigrants). Although this term had historically been used for all the indigenous people ...

newsweekly in the U.S. The column has now migrated to the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund site blog.

Early life and education

Born in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

, Guillermo is an alumnus of

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, where he studied history and film, and was a member of the Harvard Lampoon. He delivered the Ivy Oration as class humorist in 1977.

Career

From 1989-1991, he was host of NPR's "

All Things Considered ''All Things Considered'' (''ATC'') is the flagship news program on the American network National Public Radio (NPR). It was the first news program on NPR, premiering on May 3, 1971. It is broadcast live on NPR affiliated stations in the United ...

." He was the first Asian American male, and first Filipino American, to host a regularly scheduled national news broadcast. He has also worked as a television reporter in San Francisco, Dallas, and Washington, D.C. He has hosted his own radio talk show in Washington D.C., San Francisco and Sacramento. His writing and commentary has been widely published in newspapers around the country, and has earned him national and regional journalism awards. In 2015, Guillermo received the Asian American Journalists Association's Dr. Suzanne Ahn Award for Civil Rights & Social Justice, in recognition of excellence in coverage of Asian American Pacific Islander civil rights and social justice issues, Guillermo is the author of ''Amok: Essays from an Asian American Perspective''—a compilation of essays originally published in Asian Week—that won an

American Book Award The American Book Award is an American literary award that annually recognizes a set of books and people for "outstanding literary achievement". According to the 2010 awards press release, it is "a writers' award given by other writers" and "the ...

in 2000.

Personal life

Emil Guillermo's cousin, 26-year-old Stephen Guillermo, was fatally shot in the

Mission District The Mission District (Spanish: ''Distrito de la Misión''), commonly known as The Mission (Spanish: ''La Misión''), is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California. One of the oldest neighborhoods in San Francisco, the Mission District's name is ...

in San Francisco on May 3, 2014. Stephen, who was drunk and unarmed, got off the elevator on the wrong floor of his apartment building and entered an apartment identical to his own but two floors below. He walked to the door that had the same number of his apartment, struggled with the doorknob, but managed to get inside. The 68-year-old male occupant of that apartment fired one shot that killed Stephen. The shooter claimed that he feared for his life from an intruder. He was initially booked for murder but was released two days later and prosecutors declined to file charges against him. Emil has expressed disapproval over the prosecutors' decision to not file charges.

Bibliography

* ''Amok: Essays from an Asian American Perspective.'' San Francisco: AsianWeek Books/Monkey Tales Press, 1999.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Guillermo, Emil American male journalists American radio journalists NPR personalities American writers of Filipino descent American columnists The Harvard Lampoon alumni Writers from San Francisco Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American Book Award winners American people of Ilocano descent