First-Ever Loret Miller Ruppe Lifetime Achievement Award
Thank you all for your wonderful compliments.
Peace Corps Worldwide’s Marian Haley Beil and John Coyne
Honored with first-ever
Loret Miller Ruppe Lifetime Achievement Award
Since 1989, Peace Corps Worldwide and the Peace Corps Writers Imprint have supported the writings of the Peace Corps community to promote international understanding—the essence of the Third Goal. The longevity and reach of the work by Marian Haley Beil, publisher, and John Coyne, editor, prompted NPCA to recognize their impact with the first-ever Loret Miller Ruppe Lifetime Achievement Award, presented at this year’s Peace Corps Connect on September 9, 2023.
For nearly 35 years, Marian and John, both “Ethie One,” have worked to “bring the world back home” by shining a light on PCV and RPCV writers: publishing, reviewing, and promoting their books, essays, poetry, and stories. John researches, compiles, and often writes, material on their website. Marian design sites, edits articles, and maintains databases including one with 680 Peace Corps experience books and another of more than 1900 authors. In 2010, they founded Peace Corps Writers to enable PCVs and RPCVs to have their writings—especially their Peace Corps memoirs—to be published in print and as eBooks. To date, 68 books about the Peace Corps experience have been published by the imprint, managed by Marian.
The outpouring of reader comments on PCW, here and there, bears testimony to the gratitude and support for Marian’s and John’s work. We share a sampling of that appreciation below.
I have always looked forward to opening my email and finding new reports to read. You bring a whole world of stories to us, both strange and familiar at the same time.
The daily blogs help keep us all connected and remind us of the Third Goal.
…(M)y go-to news every morning.
It brings memories and possibilities to the forefront. I feel very fortunate to have been a part of the Peace Corps and to be able to follow its course through your incredible diligence and commitment.
John and Marian have been the pioneers for decades of communicating to the world and to other returned Peace Corps volunteers and staff what the Peace Corps experience is and was and can be. Their dedicated service has connected and inspired and publicized and appreciated all genres of Peace Corps writers.
For decades you have tirelessly created and cultivated a unique community and have done so much to ‘keep hope alive’ about the ideals and spirit of Peace Corps service.
John and Marian have served as the connective tissue within the RPCV community for so long. Peace Corps Worldwide has truly given a voice to the PCV experience through the lifting up of so many RPCV writers and their work.
…(W)e would not be identified and included together in an important canon of writing, if it were not for John Coyne and Marian Haley Beil …Think of it, where would the American Literary Canon be without their contribution? Where would the country be without their commitment to bringing home our personal truths to the greater population?
A lot of lights would have been left under the bushel baskets without the two of you.
John and Marian are deserving of a longer than lifetime achievement award!
A most deserving award for you both. It all began at Georgetown University the summer of 1962! What an adventure we will never forget. Most especially with the written history that lives on! Thank you both!
Thank you, Sue, and for your reviews you write for the site. John
The key words are lifetime achievement and, John and Marian, your mission to showcase the writings of present and return Peace Corps Volunteers has morphed over the decades into this website that is indispensable to keeping us informed and together. Thank you!
These two are amazing and the honor is well given to them.
Thank you, Don
John
Never enough times to thank you!!!
Maureen, thank you for your help. John
Congratulations, so well deserved and thank you.
And you write for the site, Joanne. Thank you.
John
John and Marian, so glad your tremendous work in building up the Peace Corps community is being recognized. You have been integral in making many of us still feel part of something BIG when we are often slowing down and losing connections as seniors. Well done!
Thank you, Michael. Great that what Marian and I have been doing is having good results, keeping us together over all these years.
Marian and John, you have often been the silent wind under the wings of PC writers. Thank you.
Patricia Edmisten
I’m so delighted to see you two honored for your heartfelt work on running this incredible site. Moreover, I’m ever so grateful for letting me review AND be reviewed here!
Eric, thank you, and thank you for your help with our site.
Congratulations, John and Marian! What a most deserved honor. So glad that this finally came to fruition after Glenn Blumhorst initiated this well over a year ago!
Catherine, thank you and thank you for remembering and tell us that it was Glenn Blumhorst who started it all. Glenn did a lot of great things for the NPCA. Sorry to see him gone.
Who would have thought in ’62 in Kalamazoo and WMU and then in July on the plane from Detroit
to Pittsburgh to DC and Georgetown in July and training we’d be still alive and joined by the PC in
2023. Not me. But thanks to both of you the PC remains relevant and active. Thanks. Bill
Thanks Bill, and you were around at the ‘beginning.’
No one deserves this award more than you and Marian! You’ve done stupendous work in promoting Peace Corps through stories and you’ve been a tremendous help to those who want to tell their stories. I thought the epitome of your career was at the Library of Congress a few years ago organized by Senator Garamendi, but this is an even higher plateau of recognition of your inestimable work through the years.
Congratulations!
Leita
Thank you, Leita, and for remembering the Library of Congress great event.
Dear Marian & John:
Take a more than welcomed bow for being the recipients of this well-deserved award! Your combined work over the decades, especially during the recent Covid-19 Crisis when many in our world thought that Peace Corps itself no longer existed, was especially important to the Agency’s post-disease survival. In demonstrating that Peace Corps was still active via its 3rd Goal, you both ensured that it would survive and thrive once again. The placement of new Volunteers over the past several months serve as living proof that the Peace Corps ideal is alive and well–with great thanks to Marian and you for keeping its flame lit as a lone beacon in a darkened world for all to see.
Well done!
Jerry, thank you for your kind words, and for the writing that you have done for the site. All those scholarly pieces on RPCV writers.
Dear Marian and John,
Congratulations that your initiative with Peace Corps Writers is recognized. So well deserved. It is a joy to check your work daily to know that maybe we did do some good as PCVs.
Thank you.
Kay, we have seen, as you just noted, some great work done by PCVs….Lets get as much as we can down “on the Internet” so others will see the jobs done by PCVs over all these years.
Congratulations to both of you. I am so happy to know you, and I enjoy all of the writings you send to all of us. I hope, like me, that you are well and happy.
Best wishes,
CH
Congratulations to both of you. Richly deserved for keeping up the Peace Corps experience and informing us by publishing great books
Many thanks, Suzanne, for your lovely note. John
To Marian and John,
The Miller Ruppe Lifetime Achievement Award is more than merited after all the attention and time you have devoted to the Peace Corps and PC writers. More will follow.
Thank you all for your wonderful compliments.