Peace Corps writers

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 . . .

Yesterday evening, March 6, 2012, Bonnie Lee Black (Gabon 1996-98) received a Gourmand International World Cookbook Awards in Paris, France, for her book How to Cook a Crocodile.  How to Cook a Crocodile: A Memoir with Recipes was the first book published by the Peace Corps Writers Imprint. Bonnie’s book won the “Charity and Community” category award.  The event, held in the Folies Bergeres theater, attracted an audience from all over the world. Bonnie, who is a blogger on this site at: Cooking Crocodiles & Other Food Musings, gave her acceptance speech in both French and English. The 16-year-old organization Gourmand International, headquartered in Madrid, Spain, publishes GOURMAND magazine and sponsors the Gourmand World Cookbooks Awards.  The 2011 awards celebration at the Folies Bergère kicks off a week-long Paris Cookbook Fair.  Congratulations, Bonnie!

Published at Coloradoan.com Fort Collins author assembles Peace Corps anthologies By Stacy Nick StacyNick@coloradoan.com IN 1967, 21-YEAR-OLD JANE ALBRITTON traveled to India as a volunteer for the Peace Corps. It was an experience that changed her life and how she saw the world around her. Forty years later, it motivated her to tackle another adventure: putting her experiences, and those of other Peace Corps volunteers, on paper. With the help of fellow Peace Corps volunteers, Albritton put together a series of four anthologies featuring 200 stories from Volunteers who served all over the world to celebrate and honor 50 years of the Peace Corps. “I started getting old, actually,” Albritton joked as to why she decided to start the project. After years of “pestering” others to record their histories, it occurred to her that her and her fellow Volunteers’ stories might be lost if they weren’t written down. Albritton, a . . .

From The Daily Athenaeum, student newspaper of West Virginia University in Morgantown. Wednesday, February 22, 2012 • English professor receives literary award by Carlee Lammers For Mark Brazaitis, director of West Virginia University’s Creative Writing Program, inspiration and creativity have always sprung from personal experience and a fascination with particular images. “As a writer, I’m always curious about where certain images or ideas will take me,” Brazaitis said. The WVU professor is a recent winner of the University of Notre Dame’s Richard Sullivan Prize “The Incurables,” a collection of ten short stories about the impact of mental illness on the men and women in a small Ohio town. Brazaitis said the book also includes stories of other incurable conditions, familial relationships that never seem to satisfy anyone involved and romantic relationships that offer as much heartache as pleasure. “For the first story in the collection, ‘The Bridge,’ I had this vision . . .

A Small Key Opens Big Doors — 50 Years of Amazing Peace Corps Stories, Volume Three: The Heart of Eurasia edited by Jay Chen (Kazakhstan 2005–08) Series editor Jane Albritton (India 1967–69) Travelers’ Tales/Solas House $18.95 (paperback) 336 pages October 2011 • Letters From Moritz Thomsen: Peace Corps Legend by Christopher West Davis (Kenya 1975–77) Createspace $11.95 (paperback) 137 pages October 2011 • About Face: A Novel by Carole Howard (Staff Spouse: Ivory Coast, Togo, Senegal 1972–75) Warkwick Associates $13.95 (paperback); $2.99 (Kindle) 315 pages September 2011 • The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo (Micronesia 1979–80) Crown $23.00 (hardcover); $14.00 (paperback); $11.99 (Kindle) 320 pages July 2011 • Citrus White Gold: An Alternate History of Citrus County, Florida by John Charles Miller (Dominican Republic 1962–64) CreateSpace $14.95 (paperback) 223 pages August 2011 • You Can’t Pick Up Raindrops: A Collection of Short Stories by John Charles Miller (Dominican Republic 1962–64) . . .

Poet, writer, and editor Christopher Conlon (Botswana 1988–90) has been named one of six finalists for the prestigious Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Novel for his book A Matrix of Angels (Creative Guy Publishing, 2011). The Stokers have been given annually in a variety of categories since 1987 by the Horror Writers Association, and they are considered the premier award in the field. This year’s winners will be announced at a gala banquet March 31 at the World Horror Convention in Salt Lake City. “It’s very exciting,” says the author. “I won a Stoker a couple of years ago, but that was an award for my work as an editor. I’m thrilled that this time around the HWA has seen fit to recognize my writing.” Past winners of the Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel have included Stephen King, Peter Straub, and . . .

Interview: Richard Tillotson, Author of Acts of God While On Vacation By April Pohren, BLOGCRITICS.ORG Published 09:00 p.m., Sunday, February 12, 2012 Richard Tillotson has been a Peace Corps volunteer, a playwright in New York, a copywriter in Hawaii, and is a relative of an English Lord, all of which helped him write Acts of God While on Vacation, a National Semi-Finalist for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and named “Hawaii’s best fiction book of 2011” by The Honolulu Star-Advertiser. He works in Honolulu and vacations in Washington DC. Please tell us a bit about your book and what you hope readers take away from reading it. The novel begins with a death threat received by a philandering general manager of a lavish Hawaii resort, jumps to an anthropologist researching headhunters in the jungles of Borneo, then to a demonic, scandal-mongering paparazzo in New York, and on to a gorgeous, party-loving . . .

Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963–65), anthropologist and writer, has won national recognition for his recent non-fiction book, Big Dogs of Tibet and the Himalayas: A Personal Journey (Orchid Press). His book received the Dog Writers Association of America’s (DWAA) prestigious Maxwell Medallion for Excellence at their annual meeting in New York City in early February.           Big Dogs is the result of Don’s life-long love of Tibetan mastiffs and other large canines of the Himalayan regions. He first went to Nepal as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1963, and returned later as an anthropologist. After he encountered the big dogs of the Himalayan region he began nearly a half-century of research on their place in local cultures and as livestock (yak and sheep) guardians. The book, based on his in-depth research is part memoir, part history and cultural description, and part reference book about the Tibetan mastiffs, with sections on three . . .

Soda Springs: Love, Sex and Civil Rights by Terry Marshall (Philippines 1965–68; Solomon Islands & Kiribati Co-CD 1977–80, PC Washington 1980–82) Illustrations by Chuck Asay Friesen Press 367 pages Hardcover $30.39, paperback $19.13, Kindle $7.79 December 2010 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000–02, Madagascar 2002–03) IF A POLITICALLY-CORRECT, TWO-DIMENSIONAL  soap opera  featuring twenty-year-old virgins is what you’re looking for, then Terry Marshall’s novel Soda Springs: Love, Sex and Civil Rights is the book for you. One of the reasons I found the novel irksome — just as with another recent book by a former Peace Corps Country Director, J. Larry Brown and Peasants Come Last — is Marshall’s heavy-handed marketing of Soda Springs. Unlike most review books that come my way, Soda Springs was accompanied by a leaflet campaign touting the cumbersome tome as, “Soda Springs, a place you’ll never forget. A book you can’t put down. You’ll laugh. . . .

One for the Road David Mather (Chile 1968–70) Peace Corps Writers 400 pages $14.95 (paperback) 2011 Reviewed by Reilly Ridgell (Micronesia 1971–73) THERE ARE SOME 32 PEACE CORPS NOVELS listed in the Peace Corps Worldwide bibliography. I’ve now read four and written one. From that small sample, I’m beginning to detect some patterns that may hinder us Peace Corps novelists from achieving the success we dream of.  Generally speaking, the Peace Corps novels that I’ve read tend to be long on setting and short on plot. In fact, and I was guilty of this, the plot tends to be a vehicle with which to provide the reader with all kinds of information about the Peace Corps experience. Sometimes we end up with novels that read like memoirs. We are just so affected by our time in Peace Corps and how different life can be somewhere other than a US suburb that . . .

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) is a national association of librarians, library workers and advocates library services for teens. Each year they give out an Alex Awards for ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults. The winning titles are selected from the previous year’s publishing. The Alex Awards were first given annually beginning in 1998 and became an official ALA award in 2002. One of the winning books this year is The Talk-Funny Girl (Crown, July 2011) written by Roland Merullo (Micronesia 1979–80). The  novel is set in central western New Hampshire. It is the story of a seventeen-year-old girl who lives with her parents in a cabin in the woods. They belong to a cult that believes the sins of the adults are forgiven through the suffering of the children. (“Suffer the little children. . .” a Biblical verse they grossly misinterpret.) They are abusive and . . .

DURING A BRIEF PERIOD in the 1970s the Peace Corps accepted families as Volunteers. Frances and Paul Stone eagerly  made the decision to sign up for the program as a way of serving their country overseas for two years. They were among the first families to join, and were assigned to the Philippines with their four children to share their expertise in agriculture and education while keeping up with their  energetic, enthusiastic youngsters. Frances Stone’s (Philippines 1971–73) Through the Eyes of My Children: The Adventures of a Peace Corps Volunteer Family, published this month by Peace Corps Writers, is a delightful read for young adults from middle school age on up who are interested in true life adventures about young people. This is the story of a family of six who all become Peace Corps Volunteers, and it is told in the voices of the children. Daniel the oldest sees . . .

Letters From Moritz Thomsen by Christopher West Davis (Kenya 1975–78) Create Space $ 11.95 (paperback) 137 pages 2010 Review by John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962-64) WHEN YOU OPEN A BOOK and read the first paragraph that begins: One lazy spring afternoon in 1981, a high school friend from New York, Peter L., showed up at the door of my basement apartment in Washington, D.C. with a scruffy old geezer in tow. The old guy was writer Moritz Thomsen, 64 at the time, once dubbed “the greatest American writer you’ve never heard of,” who was making a rare trip north from his self-imposed exile in Ecuador to visit his literary friends and agent in New York, and take the train down here to D.C. to attend a lecture by another of his friends, Paul Theroux, at the Library of  Congress. Well, you know you are dealing with a real writer. Christopher West Davis is . . .