Tom Coffman

Tom Coffman is an independent researcher, writer, and producer. He graduated from the William Allen White School, Kansas University, with a Bachelor in Journalism, and became a reporter for United Press International in New Mexico in 1965. Within a year, the managing editor of the Honolulu Advertiser loaned Coffman plane fare to come to Hawai‘i, where he became state government reporter for the Advertiser. He moved to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin two years later and became political reporter and bureau chief. In 1972, he wrote Catch a Wave, a widely read chronicle of the 1970 gubernatorial campaign and the social and political turmoil of that period. A year later, he left newspaper reporting to work as an independent writer and media producer.

Expanding on research for Catch a Wave, his productions increasingly incorporated historic themes. Under the guidance of the legendary Hawaiian writer John Dominis Holt, he began to integrate a chronology of the development of Hawai‘i, which led to the television documentaries O Hawai‘i: From Settlement to Kingdom and Nation Within.

Tom Coffman’s work has won national awards for production of video, film, interactive media, and multi-image. Ganbare, about the early wartime experiences of Japanese Americans, was selected Best Film by a Hawai‘i Filmmaker at the 1995 Hawai‘i International Film Festival. Two of his books—the first edition of Nation Within and The Island Edge of America: A Political History of America—received Ka Palapala Po‘okela Awards for Excellence in Nonfiction from the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association. After publication of Nation Within, Coffman also received the Hawai‘i Award for Literature, the highest recognition given by the state of Hawai‘i for outstanding literary achievement. He is currently working on a film about the assassination of Benigno Aquino, Jr., in the Philippines.