“Annotated Bibliography of Peace Corps Writers’ Books in the Library of Congress”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This bibliography owes its existence to an exchange of letters between Rep. John Garamendi (Ethiopia, 1966–68) and Dr. James Billington, who served as the 13th the Librarian of Congress (September 1987–September 2015). In his letter of December 17, 2010 [see https://peacecorpsworldwide.org/pc-writers/files/2011/01/letter.pdf] (sic— link does not work), the Honorable Rep. Garamendi asked Dr. Billington to mark the special 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps on September 22, 2011, “by establishing a collection of books about the Peace Corps experience written by former Peace Corps Volunteers and Peace Corps staff.” In response, Dr. Billington offered to develop “a bibliography of books and creative works by former volunteers that could be made available through the Library’s Web site.”

The bibliographer is grateful to the following Library of Congress staffers (listed alphabetically):

•  Brynda Joyce Harris, Congressional Relations Office, for conducting liaison with Congress;
•  William E. Kellum, Office of Special Initiatives (OSI), for coordinating the userfriendly Web-site version of the bibliography;
•  Cindy E. Moore, Office of the Librarian’s Chief of Staff, for creating the cover artwork and preparing the page layout for the printed version using Adobe’s InDesign software; and
•  Sabrina C. Thomas, Program Planning Specialist, Library Services, for supporting and coordinating the project.

In addition, Elizabeth Jenkins-Joffe, a retired Library recommending officer and a returned Peace Corps volunteer (Colombia, 1963–65), recommended a collection of books sent by Peace Corps writers to the office of Rep. Garamendi in 2011 for the purpose of adding them to the LC collections. This bibliography cites many of those donated books.

The bibliographer acknowledges “The Bibliography of Books by Peace Corps Writers” (http://www.peacecorpswriters.org/pages/depts/resources/bibliog/bib.html). Edited and published by Marian Haley Beil, PeaceCorpsWriters.org . . .. The bibliographer relied on PeaceCorpsWriters.org as an authoritative guide for identifying most returned Peace Corps authors. However, he used the Library of Congress Catalog as the source of all bibliographic metadata. The bibliographer also acknowledges the publishers of the cited books for most of the book descriptions quoted in the annotations.

The Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution. As the largest library in the world, it holds more than 155 million items in various languages, disciplines, and formats. The Library serves the U.S. Congress and the nation both on-site in its reading rooms on Capitol Hill and through its award-winning Website at http://www.loc.gov.

To view the Library of Congress bibliography, click on the cover or bold title above.