Archive - June 26, 2015

THE PEACE CORPS EXPERIENCE AWARD was initiated in 1992. It is presented annually to a Peace Corps Volunteer or staff member, past or present for the best depiction of life in the Peace Corps — be it daily life, project assignment, travel, host country nationals, other Volunteers, readjustment. Initially entries could be short works including: personal essay, story, novella, poem, letter, cartoon, or song. Beginning in 2009 memoirs were added to the list. In 1997, this award was renamed to honor Moritz Thomsen (Ecuador 1965–67) whose Living Poor has been widely cited as an outstanding telling of the essence of the Peace Corps experience. • The winner of the 2015 Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award is At Home on the Kazakh Steppe: A Peace Corps Memoir by Janet Givens (Kazakhstan 2004–06) • In her memoir, Janet clearly expresses the First Goal of the Peace Corps, writing that as a . . .