September 9, 2011 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Is there something missing from official Peace Corps/Washington’s celebration of the 50th?

Sep 09 2011

Every Fall, Oklahoma empties out on one bright weekend and everyone goes to Dallas for the only football game that matters: In the Cotton Bowl – Texas Longhorns vs. Oklahoma Sooners, The Red River Rivalry. Austin comes to Dallas, too. Some people actually manage to have game tickets. There are class reunions; family get-togethers; stories told and retold of triumphs and defeat; old friends and new ones; a celebration of who it is they are. It is big deal. I think the 50th Anniversary Celebration in DC will be a little like that. Group reunions, parties, and rumors of parties; stories told and retold; old friends and new; a celebration of us. Except.There is no big game. There is no one event that symbolizes who it is we were and should become. No RPCVs will be reading their Journals of Peace, 24/48 hours in the Rotunda of the Capital- as was organized . . .

Cynthia Morrison Phoel winner of Maria Thomas Fiction Award

Sep 09 2011

Cynthia Morrison Phoel (Bulgaria 1994–96) is the winner of the Maria Thomas Fiction Award for Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories published in 2010 by Southern Methodist University Press. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in a Bulgarian town not unlike the one in her stories. She holds degrees from Cornell University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, and Cerise Press. She lives near Boston with her husband and their three children. In the review of Cold Snap in Booklist Donna Seaman wrote: “Phoel’s first collection of stories and a novella incisively dramatizes the interlocked lives of the beleaguered denizens of a Bulgarian town. Phoel spent time in Bulgaria as a Peace Corps volunteer, but one gets no sense of an outsider looking in. Instead, she fully inhabits the minds of her jittery characters as they grapple with various . . .

Archive - September 9, 2011