Winner of 2011 Photography Award — Richard Sitler (Jamaica 2000-02)
Way to go, Richard!
Richard Sitler’s (Jamaica 2000–02) Making Peace with the World: Photographs of Peace Corps Volunteers published by Other Places Publishing has won the Peace Corps Writers’ award for best photography book of 2011.
Richard is a photojournalist who grew up in Knightstown, Indiana. He worked at newspapers in Ohio, Indiana, New Hampshire and New Jersey. Most recently Sitler was on staff at The Herald Bulletin in Anderson, Ind. Sitler is a graduate of Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois. He also studied at The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine.
From 2000 to 2002 Sitler took a break from his photojournalism career to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica. Sitler was placed in the rural community of Lluidas Vale where he served as an at-risk youth advisor to the Lluidas Vale All Age School.
In 2006 Sitler returned to Jamaica as a Crisis Corps Volunteer (now called Peace Corps Response) where he served as a Curriculum Developer for a community youth training ceter in Ewarton, St. Catherine.
Sitler is currently back in Jamaica, this time as a Peace Corps Response volunteer. He is working as a Video Documentation Specialist for Caribbean Vulnerable Communities Coalition.
Winners of the Peace Corps Writers Awards receive a certificate and small cash award.
Morocco Peace Corps Volunteer Muriel Johnston, 84, and her host mother and daughter laugh together in Tanant. Muriel lived with this family through the three months of training. She was thrilled to find out that she had placed to serve in the same community, so now she lives in her own place, but within walking distance of her host family, so she visits often. At the time of her service in 2010 Muriel was the current oldest serving Peace Corps Volunteer. Muriel is one of the volunteers whose day-to-day lives are visually chronicled in “Making Peace with the World”.
You can link to the facebook page for the book and it has pictures posted to it: https://www.facebook.com/MPWTW
Way to go, Richard!