Jeff Fearnside (Kazakhstan 20002-04) has recently had several pieces published or accepted for publication. Two poems appeared in the online journal Protestpoems.org, while a personal essay appeared in Etude: New Voices in Literary Nonfiction. [http://etude.uoregon.edu/spring2009/essay]

 He has poems forthcoming in If Poetry Journal and The Los Angeles Review as well as short stories forthcoming in Eureka Literary Magazine, Cantaraville, and Arroyo Literary Review. Fearnside is managing editor of the literary journal Alligator Juniper at Prescott College , where he also teaches writing.

Jason Sanford ( Thailand 1994-96) has won the 2008 Interzone Readers Poll for his short story “When Thorns Are the Tips of Trees.” The award is voted on by readers of the British speculative fiction magazine Interzone.

A second Interzone story by Jason, “The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain,” placed #4 in the Readers’ Poll and will be reprinted a few weeks from now in the anthology Year’s Best SF 14.  Interzone has also accepted a 20,000-word novella from Jason for publication later in the year. For more information check out Jason’s web site.

Robert Albritton (Ethiopia 1963-65) teaches at a university in Canada and has a book coming out this month that might interest you. It is entitled, Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity. From the book jacket, “Capitalism may promise cheap, nutritious food for all, but it has failed to deliver on that promise.” The book explores the economics of our food system, and it explains why a quarter of the world’s population go hungry despite the fact that enough food is produced worldwide to feed us all.

Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, says about the book, “Marx understood the dynamics of the current food crisis over a century ago. Robert Albritton has written a fine primer, bridging the best thinking of the nineteenth century to the urgent needs of the twenty-first.”

And Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, author of Food Politics, writes. “[This book] pulls no punches in its analysis….To understand how starvation and obesity can coexist in the same populations, follow the flow of capital. Everyone who cares about food equity and the preservation of democracy should read this book.”

 The Choosing America Project is looking for true short stories that express the “very essence of being an immigrant in America.” They are looking for ”gripping human interest stories that will  reflect the diversity of the American immigrant experience, past and  present.”

Do you have a story to tell? Go to  www.choosingamerica.com .

If you don’t have a story, then pass this request onto someone you know. They are trying to disseminate this information to as many immigrants as possible in search of the best material. Forward this to other writers, editors, students,  professors, educators, seniors, colleagues and friends, community  leaders and organizers as well as to community groups and  organizations, anyone you believe who can contribute to this  project.

Many thanks.

Michael Levy (China 2005-07) joins the expanding ‘China Gang’ of writers (Mike Meyer, Peter Hessler, and all) with a humorous memoir of serving in rural China. His account of being far from the high-rises of Beijing and his discovery of a Chinese adoration–and often–of all things Jewish, has just been sold to Holt. The memoir is entitled, Kosher Dog Meat.

Holt has published a number of RPCVs, including Sarah Erdman’s Nine Hills To Nambonkaha(Ivory Coast 1998-2000); Maureen Orth’s (Colombia 1964-66) The Importance of Being Famous; and Thurston Clarke (Tunisia 1968) The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America.

The nice thing about this blog is that I get word of new RPCV writers. Here is a writer who has been under the radar of PeaceCorpsWriters: John Shannon (Malawi 1968-71). John has written nine “Jack Liffey” mysteries and four other novels, including Courage, the story of a disillusioned American Communist who goes to Africa to help foment a revolution. This novel came out of his Peace Corps experience and left him a “prohibited immigrant” in Malawi for over a decade.

His 11 California mysteries are about Jack Liffey ”a decent guy, as compassionate as he is brave.  His city is greater LA, his turf the forgotten suburbs, run-down neighborhoods and volatile ethnic communities.

“Jack Liffey understands loss.  First he lost his job in the  aerospace industry, then he lost his wife and daughter.  All he really has left is his ability to track down missing children, and his willingness to elbow his way out into the tangle and corruption of the 21st century city.”

Shannon has build these novels around the different ethnic  social history of LA. His new book  Palos Verdes Blue (published by Pegasus) is in part a turf war between Mexican day-laborers and houseboys in a posh suburb on the sea where a group of racists surfers and bikers try to keep them out. 

You might have heard of The Concrete River, his first novel, that is back in print from Pegasus in trade paperback. It was Jack’s first case, tracking down a missing woman in East LA, and discovering how strange and dangerous the city is. It is now considered a LA classic.

Everyone has a website, and so does John Shannon. Check out: www.jackliffey.com

Bill Owens, our most famous RPCV photographer, whose new book  entitled Bill Owens came out last year, and who is internationally known for his book Suburbia, has a new exhibition in his hometown of Hayward, California opening on April 17. This exhibition is the first to feature Bill’s photographs from the Peace Corps in the sixties to the Rolling Stones at Altamont all the way to his newest video work. The exhibition will be up until June 18, 2009 and the opening reception is from 6:30 to 9:30 pm on Friday, April 17. For more information, go to info@photocentral.org.

David Taylor (Mauritania 1983-85) author of the recently published Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America, will be part of a book discussion at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, April 28, 2009, in the Mumford Room in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress. The discussion begins at 3 p.m. This is an important book by an important RPCV writer and this library event will include screening of scenes from the Soul of a People TV documentary, to be broadcast late this summer.

Christopher Conlon (Botswana 1988-90) novel Midnight on Mourn Street published by Earthling Publications in May 2008 has been nominated for The Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association of America. It was nominated in the  category of Superior Achievement in a First Novel. The award will be presented in June, in Burbank, California. Paul Shovlin (Moldova 1996-98) in his PeaceCorpsWriters review compared Conlon to Poe, saying, “[its], an apt comparison, especially in terms of atmosphere, which Conlon is adept at establishing. The feeling of gloom and dark brooding that pervades the novel is one of its strongest points.”