Archive - March 8, 2012

March 07, 2012 Discover Great New Writers award Michael Levy’s (China 2005-07) memoir, Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating With China’s Other Billion ( Holt), was one of  the two winners of Barnes & Noble’s annual “Discover Great New Writers” awards, announced Wednesday at a lunch in New York.   The memoir by Levy, 35, a teacher in Brooklyn, N.Y. , recounts his Peace Corps experience in rural China in 2005 as a basketball-playing, kosher vegetarian. He said he began the day Wednesday at his day job – a Catholic school where a “wide-eyed 9-year-old asked me why I was dressed in a jacket and tie.” Levy replied that he was going to a ceremony to celebrate “great new writers.” The girl got very excited and asked, “Did you write The Hunger Games?” He had to explain that he didn’t. A panel of former award winners picked the winers. Each received $10,000 and . . .

Roger Landrum was a PCV in Nigeria, 1961-63.  He taught at the new University of Nigeria at Nsukka in Nigeria’s first year of independence and his experience was the subject of a Peace Corps documentary film called “Give Me A Riddle.”  Landrum was one of the first RPCVs to join the PC/W staff. Landrum devoted most of his subsequent career to expanding youth service opportunities in the US. He founded and directed The Teachers Inc. which provided Peace Corps-like programming for American inner-city schools. Landrum co-authored Youth and the Needs of the Nation with Harris Wofford, a policy blueprint for a large-scale national service initiative.  In 1986 Landrum launched Youth Service America (YSA) which led efforts to expand and mobilize a national youth service infrastructure that culminated in the National and Community Service Acts of 1990 and 1993 and creation of the federal Corporation for National Service along with AmeriCorps. As . . .