Wilfredo O. Pascual Jr. (born 1969) is an internationally acclaimed essayist, winner of the Curt Johnson Prose Award for Nonfiction and a runner-up to the Steinberg Essay Prize. In 2016, he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He grew up in the Philippines where his essays have won several national awards, including the Palanca's grand prize twice and the Philippine Free Press Literary Awards. He is also a board of trustees adviser and member of the Samahang Makasining (Artist Club), Inc. since 2005. Career He received a Creative Nonfiction scholarship to Breadloaf Writers Conference and attended Squaw Valley's Community of Writers Workshop and New York University's Summer Intensive Creative Writing Program. He moved to the United States in 2005 and lives with his husband in San Francisco's Mission District where he is currently at work on his first collection of essays. Pascual has worked in international development in 17 countries in Asia and Africa. From 1996 to 2005, he worked with the highest education officials in the region as Publications Officer of the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization. From 2008 to 2013, he worked with the San Francisco-based nonprofit Room to Read as Global Program Officer where he led the language local publishing program. Pascual held international workshops on writing and illustrating for children, which resulted to the publication of over seven million copies of 700 original children's books in more than twenty local languages. In 2011 the program was awarded the 2011 UNESCO Literacy Confucius Prize. Pascual received the award in New Delhi from the President of India and the UNESCO Secretary-General. Awards Winner, 2015 Curt Johnson Prize for Nonfiction Notable Citation, 2016 Best American Essays "You Have Me" December Literary Journal, Issue 26.2 2015 Judge and acclaimed poet Albert Goldbarth hailed its "durable, clear, grammatically sophisticated sentences... The prose here is smart and relies not on loose imagery but on tight declaration. Its mix of research into the sciences (heredity, genetics) and recounting of the personal (a father's death, a son's marriage) are savvily and seamlessly twined." Runner-up, 2016 Steinberg Essay Prize "Terminus" Fourth Genre, forthcoming February 2017 Judge and essayist Ned Stuckey French: "... wonderfully written, very affecting... it illuminated its subject -- gay life in a global context -- in a way I at least have not seen before." Nominated for the 2016 Pushcart Prize and 2016 Best of the