Peace Corps Worldwide Awards

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2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers’ Award as “Writer of the Year”
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2023 Winner of the Peace Corps Writers’ Publisher’s Award
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2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers‘ Publisher’s Special Staff Award
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2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Peace Corps Memoir
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2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers’ Award for Best Travel Book
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2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers’ Award for Best Poetry Book
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2023  Winner of the Peace Corps Writers‘ Moritz Thomsen Award for Best Book about the Peace Corps Experience
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2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers’ Award for Best Book for a Young Reader
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2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Book of Non-Fiction
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2023 Winner of the Peace Corps Writers‘ Maria Thomas Award for Best Fiction
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2022 Award for Writer of the Year
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2022 Winner of the Best Third Goal Effort: LUCKY: An African Student, An American Dream, and a Long Bike Ride
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2022 Winner of the Best Short Story Collection — A HUSBAND AND WIFE ARE ONE SATAN
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2022 Award for Best Book for Young Adults — ADVENTURES OF MAYANA: FALLING OFF THE EDGE OF THE EARTH
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2022 Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award Winner — I MISS THE RAIN IN AFRICA

2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers’ Award as “Writer of the Year”

  Richard  Wiley (Korea 1967–69)   Richard Wiley, who served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Korea, 1967-69, is an American novelist and short-story writer whose first novel, Soldiers in Hiding, won the 1987 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Since then, he has published seven other novels and a wide variety of short stories. His subsequent novels, Fool’s Gold, Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, and Indigo received favorable notice in America’s flagship book periodical the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Despite this, only his more recent book Ahmed’s Revenge, published by Random House remains in print. Richard holds a B. A. from the University of Puget Sound and an M. A. from Sophia University in Tokyo. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied under the venerable John Irving. Since 1989, Richard has been a Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He . . .

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2023 Winner of the Peace Corps Writers’ Publisher’s Award

Building Community: Answering Kennedy’s Call Harlan Russell Green (Turkey 1964–66)   Building Community: Answering Kennedy’s Call, Harlan Green’s memoir of his years working to build successful communities at home and abroad, shows what is possible when communities come together to improve their lives. He describes his work as a Peace Corps Volunteer in a rural community development program in a Turkish village teaching vocational skills and convincing the villagers to develop new agricultural methods. Green also worked as a photographer and filmmaker for the USEPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency) in its earliest days lobbying communities to implement the Clean Air and Water Acts that were enacted to mitigate the growing air and water pollution. He joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers of America during its mid-1970s struggle organizing seasonal farm workers to better their living conditions; and documented the grape and lettuce boycotts, and Cesar’s charismatic leadership using . . .

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2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers‘ Publisher’s Special Staff Award

Back to the Future in Bandipur Chin Kumar Shrestha’ (Staff/Nepal) translated by Mike Gill (Nepal 1967-70) English version edited by John Comings (Nepal 1969-72)   This autobiography by a Nepali provides all RPCVs a window into the impact they had on the people who trained them, worked with them and were their friends. “I really enjoyed reading From Bandipur and Back (Ghumiphiri Bandipur), by my old friend Chij Kumar Shrestha, and happy to be included in the English translation. There is a special reason for my pleasure. Chij and I are almost the same age and have had many of the same experiences. This book presents the story of how a young man educated in a village school overcame countless obstacles as a result of his diligence, hard work, and honesty, rising to a position of great public success in a city like Kathmandu. At the same time, this book . . .

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2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Peace Corps Memoir

Turquoise: Three Years in Ghana A Peace Corps Memoir by Lawrence Grobel Ghana (1968-71) • In 1968, Larry Grobel did the party-hardy at the Aboakyere festival in Ghana, a “crazy, wild stoned-out freaky affair! People filling the streets like army ants around a carcass. No space left uncovered, dancing, drumming, singing and chanting, laughing and shouting, moving, jumping, throwing flags, waving swords, guzzling beer, pito, palm wine and akpeteshe, chewing kola nuts, smoking wee,’ celebrating the way a festival should be celebrated: up high and out of sight!” Grobel, then twenty-one, thought he was going to Guyana as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He misread; he was sent to Ghana. The names started with ‘G’ and ended in ‘ana’. One was in South America, the other in West Africa. Didn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t Vietnam, as he explains in his most recent memoir, Turquoise. He opposed the Vietnam War. Turquoise is a panoply of vignettes . . .

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2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers’ Award for Best Travel Book

My Saddest Pleasures: 50 Years on the Road: Part of the Yin and Yang of Travel Series Mark D. Walker (Guatemala 1971–73)   This book is part of the author’s “Yin and Yang of Travel” series of ten essays, which was inspired by Paul Theroux’s (Malawi 1963–65) The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road Mr. Walker has spent over 50 years traveling in many countries around the world, first as a Peace Corps volunteer, and later as a professional fund raiser for various nonprofit organizations or NGOs. The book is an easy read. Walker writes in a conversational style, and it is only 63 pages. It is primarily a journal of his travels alone, with his family, and leading trips for donors to NGOs he worked for. His travel has been mostly off the beaten path rather than to popular tourist destinations. It is apparent he has learned . . .

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2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers’ Award for Best Poetry Book

  Ten Years A Poet Philip Fretz (Sierra Leone 1967–69)   I have written poems and short stories since I can remember, years before word processing freed me from the perils of my illegible handwriting. Subsequent to retiring, I discovered first the Osher Life Long Learning program in Lewes, Delaware, and then the Renaissance Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Both of these programs offered many opportunities to practice writing in many subject areas with encouragement from classmates and instructors. The selection of poems in this volume represent many that were spawned by participation in these programs. I’ve been awakened to notice the people I see in ordinary settings and events that occur in everyday life. They arouse my inspiration to record what I see and hear and translate those ideas into poetry and prose. Philip Fretz has lived in Philadelphia, southern Delaware, and in Baltimore, MD. He has been an active . . .

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2023  Winner of the Peace Corps Writers‘ Moritz Thomsen Award for Best Book about the Peace Corps Experience

  A Five Finger Feast Two Years in Kazakhstan, Lessons from the Peace Corps by Tim  Suchsland (Kazakhstan 2007–09) author and illustrator • A Five Finger Feast is a collection of coming-of-age stories set to the backdrop of Kazakhstan, with the ups and the downs, the excitement and the thrill of living abroad as a young person and working in the Peace Corps. Tim Suchsland, a teacher and artist, takes the reader on a very interesting journey into a vast corner of the world that  none of us has ever seen, of which we know virtually nothing, which borders on Russia’s infamous Siberia and yet is populated with very interesting people — Kazaks from many tribes, Armenians, Volga Germans and Russians — each with a story of how their people came to be in the village of Valenka, twenty miles from the Russian border and 840 miles (22 hours by road) from . . .

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2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers’ Award for Best Book for a Young Reader

  Kansas Kaleidoscope Mark G. Wentling Honduras (1967–69) & Togo (1970–73)   In many ways, 11-year-old Marky is a typical kid in 1950s Kansas. He collects baseball cards like other boys his age, goes fishing and hunting with his father, and has a good shot at winning his town’s annual turtle race. But his family is not immune to hardships. Marky and his siblings, for example, rarely see their dad, Boyd, who works the graveyard shift at an aircraft plant 30 miles away. Their mother, Gerry, is a manic-depressive; Marky adores her but is perpetually worried about her oscillating moods. After two decades of marriage and six children, Marky’s parents engage in arguments that escalate in frequency and violence. Intense fights send Gerry fleeing to a neighbor’s house only for Boyd to chase her down. With his older siblings out of the nest, Marky becomes the protector of his two . . .

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2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Book of Non-Fiction

  Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet by Michael Meyer (China 1995-97)   The incredible story of Benjamin Franklin’s parting gift to the working-class people of Boston and Philadelphia — a deathbed wager that captures the Founder’s American Dream and his lessons for our current, conflicted age. Benjamin Franklin was not a gambling man. But at the end of his illustrious life, the Founder allowed himself a final wager on the survival of the United States: a gift of two thousand pounds to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent out to tradesmen over the next two centuries to jump-start their careers. Each loan would be repaid with interest over ten years. If all went according to Franklin’s inventive scheme, the accrued final payout in 1991 would be a windfall. In Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet, Michael Meyer traces the evolution of these twin funds as they age alongside America itself, bankrolling woodworkers and . . .

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2023 Winner of the Peace Corps Writers‘ Maria Thomas Award for Best Fiction

The World Against Her Skin: A Son’s Novel  John Thorndike (El Salvador 1967-68) The World Against Her Skin is an extraordinary work, written by a mature, highly published author. John Thorndike defines his book as a “Son’s Novel,” a hybrid memoir/novel or “biographical novel.” It is his endeavor to know his mother, as he openly states in his “Author’s Note, “I want to know everything about my mother,” especially the secrets that were kept from him as her son. He inhabits this woman character in order to know her. His are the height of literary goals; find truth through your imagination, cross boundaries through sympathy and empathy, and do it because you need to for survival. It beautifully flies in the face of current stricture to only write what you can know as determined by your gender, race, ethnicity, class and so on. Thorndike completely succeeds in capturing feelings that many . . .

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2022 Award for Writer of the Year

  Tom Bissell Uzbekistan 1996   Tom Bissell  was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. He has published ten books, including Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia (2003), The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (2007), Apostle (2016), and Creative Types: And Other Stories (2021). His work has been awarded the Rome Prize, the 2004 Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Travel Book for Chasing the Sea, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also done extensive screenwriting work for both the video-game industry and Hollywood. His work on Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End earned him a WGA Award for Best Video Game Writing. He co-developed the series The Mosquito Coast, based on the novel of the same name by RPCV Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963–65), for Apple Television. His most well-known book, The Disaster Artist: My Life inside ‘The Room’, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever . . .

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2022 Winner of the Best Third Goal Effort: LUCKY: An African Student, An American Dream, and a Long Bike Ride

by Brooke Marshall Malawi 2013–15   Poverty, hunger, disease, and a damaged education system prevent most rural Malawian students from finishing high school. Even if you’re persistent, gifted, and lucky enough to graduate with honors, college is prohibitively expensive. You could be the smartest kid in school and still end up working as a subsistence farmer for the rest of your life. What if these students could go to college in America? To try to answer this question, Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Brooke Marshall rode a bicycle from Raleigh to Seattle, visiting universities and telling them about the potential of students from the African village. This is a story about her journey, the people she met, and what she learned on the way. It’s about what happens when you try to change the world: the good, the bad, and the awkward. And it’s a passionate plea for everyone — whether . . .

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2022 Winner of the Best Short Story Collection — A HUSBAND AND WIFE ARE ONE SATAN

by Jeff Fearnside Kazakhstan 2002–04     I find a great deal of pleasure in reading fiction set in other cultures or countries, especially when the work demonstrates more than a superficial understanding of the place about which it is written. That was one motivation behind the anthology series I curated, Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet (Press 53 2016). It was also in that context that I first became aware of Jeff Fearnside’s work when his story set in Kazakhstan, “A Husband and Wife are One Satan,” was included in the first volume of that series. I recognized then that, having been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kazakhstan, Fearnside had the depth of knowledge of his chosen setting to bring the culture and his characters to life in both an informative and entertaining way. It was a joy, then, to discover that the story we published is the title . . .

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2022 Award for Best Book for Young Adults — ADVENTURES OF MAYANA: FALLING OFF THE EDGE OF THE EARTH

by David Perry Belize, 1985-87     The Adventures of Mayana: Falling Off the Edge of the Earth is the story of a 17-year Belizean girl named Mayana who finds herself on an adventure in a fantasyland of magic, monsters, and intrigue. She crosses over from her homeland of Belize to an alternate reality where the laws of nature and science are very different from what she learned. While she attempts to find her way back to Belize, she befriends a young man named Shifu who mysteriously appears, and speaks only in parables. He helps Mayana use her new-found magic powers to fight monsters and witches and to attempt to find her way home. Shifu also helps her to discover the meaning of life, how to understand why people are the way they are, and most of all how to understand herself. All during her journey, she relies on the recollections of . . .

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2022 Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award Winner — I MISS THE RAIN IN AFRICA

by Nancy Daniel Wesson (Uganda 2011-13)   At a time when her friends were planning cushy retirements, Nancy Wesson instead walked away from a comfortable life and business to head out as a Peace Corps Volunteer in post-war Northern Uganda. She embraced wholeheartedly the grand adventure of living in a radically different culture, while turning old skills into wisdom. Returning home became a surreal experience in trying to reconcile a life that no longer “fits.” This becomes the catalyst for new revelations about family wounds, mystical experiences, and personal foibles. Nancy shows us the power of stepping into the void to reconfigure life and enter the wilderness of the uncharted territory of our own memories and psyche, to mine the gems hidden therein. Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and tender, I Miss the Rain in Africa is the story of honoring the self, discovering a new lens through which to view life, and finding . . .

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