User:Pwandersen

San Francisco author Patrick W. Andersen enjoyed an award-winning career as a journalist before turning his writing skills to fiction. He served as managing editor of Asian Week for a decade, earning an award from the San Francisco Human Rights Commission for his coverage of Asian Pacific Americans. Under his leadership through the 1980s and early 1990s, the newspaper substantially raised the visibility and national significance of APA political concerns in both the Democratic and Republican parties. In the mid-1980s Andersen was the first to write news stories about APA gays and lesbians and the issue of AIDS within this diverse group of communities.

In fiction, Andersen authored a number of short stories, some of which were collected in the book, Moments to Contemplate (In Bite-Sized Servings).

Andersen’s first novel, Second Born, won critical acclaim for its alternate reimagining of the life of Jesus as he grew up with his brothers and sisters in a wealthy family in Galilee’s city of Sepphoris, just four miles from the village Nazareth. With a hint of issues raised in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the book casts Jesus as the second-born son of the family, the first being James, who is studying to be a priest at the Temple in Jerusalem. While people in the countryside proclaim Jesus as the King, they also come to recognize James as the Righteous One. All four brothers in the family—James, Jesus, Judas, and Simon—are leaders in the effort to restore pride to Roman-occupied Judea and Galilee.

(contributed by pwandersen)