Search Results For -Tongue

Eleanor Stanford (Cape Verde 1998-2000) new book of poems, Bartram’s Garden, has just released from Carnegie Mellon University Press. The collection of poems takes the reader from Brazil’s Bay of All Saints to Philadelphia, from Florida’s brutal humidity to the drought-scorched Cape Verde Islands. Bartram’s Garden takes in the pulse and ache of the natural world: the bittern balanced in the swamp, cashew fruit’s astringent flesh. Passionflower, rattlesnake, feather-tongued hibiscus. With a gardener’s eye for color and motif, and a mother’s open-hearted sensibility, these poems explore vivid landscapes both intimate and foreign. Of this new collection, poet Moira Egan has written, “These poems sing gorgeously ‘with their glowing throats / and feathered tongues.’” Eleanor is the author of another poetry collection, The Book of Sleep (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2008) and her Peace Corps memoir, História, História: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands (Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, 2013). She . . .

A Writer Writes Red Dress Magic by Karel Amaranth Karel Amaranth is a family friend (she attended college with my wife) and has a Bachelors degree in English and Creative Writing, and a Master of Arts degree in Fine Arts and Art Therapy.  She completed a Masters degree in Public Health at New York Medical College writing her thesis on an innovative project to address maternal mortality. While not an RPCV (well, no one is perfect) she has been working for 3 years with the Rotary Club of Makindye in Kampala, Uganda as the co-founder of Holistic Care for Mothers.  She traveled to Uganda this past summer to visit health facilities and women’s groups  to assess the needs of the communities and assist in strategic planning with Rotary Clubs, health providers and government officials, including the King of Tororo.  Holistic Care for Mothers has distributed more than 10,000 birthing kits . . .

THE PEACE CORPS EXPERIENCE AWARD was initiated in 1992. It is presented annually to a Peace Corps Volunteer or staff member, past or present for the best depiction of life in the Peace Corps. It can be a personal essay, story, novella, poem, letter, cartoon, song or memoir. The subject matter can be any aspect of the Peace Corps experience — daily life, assignment, travel, host country nationals, other Volunteers, readjustment. In 1997, this award was renamed to honor Moritz Thomsen (Ecuador 1965—67) whose Living Poor has been widely cited as an outstanding telling of the essence of the Peace Corps experience. • CONGRATULATIONS to Eleanor Stanford (Cape Verde 1998–2000) for winning the  2014 Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award for her memoir História, História: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands. Eleanor will receive a small cash award, and a certificate. This is the second Peace Corps Writers Award . . .

RPCV Malawi (1996-98) Ben East was shortlisted among ten finalists for the Dundee International Book Prize for his manuscript Sea Never Dry. The novel began as a short story about crooked cops and drug trafficking in West Africa, originally published as “One Dead Cop” in 2012 by Umbrella Factory Magazine.  Two years later, the story centers on development efforts in the region and the corrupt officials, tribal politics, and black magic that undermine progress there.  Sea Never Dry is thick with spies, cops, and fetish priests, crooks, Internet fraudsters, and the unlucky Ghanaian orphans turning a buck on Accra’s e-waste ash heaps. As a Volunteer Ben taught English in southern Malawi, and has spent nearly two decades working on various teaching and diplomatic assignments in Africa, the Middle East, and throughout the Americas.  A Connecticut native, he recently returned to the United States where he lives in Virginia with his wife and two . . .

Chasing Misery: An Anthology of Essays by Women in Humanitarian Responses Edited by Kelsey Hoppe Includes essays by Miranda Bryant (Kazakhstan 2000–02), Caryl Feldacker (Ecuador 1999–01), Emilie Greenhalgh (Cameroon 2007–09), Carmen Sheehan (Ecuador 2000–03); and photographs by Jenn Warren (Jordan 2002) CreateSpace $10.25 (paperback), $6.99 (Kindle) 318 pages 2014 Reviewed by Susi Wyss (Central African Republic 1990-92) All of the two dozen essays in Chasing Misery are written by women-including four recent RPCVs-who are attempting to describe their experiences working on humanitarian responses of the last decade around the world. While these crises each have their own causes and particular issues, and the people who work on them each have their own motivations and experiences, the world of humanitarian aid and the people dispensing it share enough in common to make this collection a cohesive whole. As any RPCV who has tried to write about their own experience knows, what . . .

The King History Forgot: Makikele, The 19th Century Legend of Phalaborwa, South Africa (Novel) Robert T.K. Scully (Kenya 1965-66) Two Harbors Press $16.95 (paperback), $5.99 (Kindle) 380 pages 2013 Reviewed by Robert E. Hamilton (Ethiopia:  1965-67) This is not your conventional African historical, political, biographical novel.  (Try saying that tongue-twister rapidly three times.)  Dr. Robert T. K. Scully has drawn extensively upon his own collection of oral history and oral tradition in the 1970s among “the people of” (Ba-) Phalaborwa (pronounced “Palaborwa)-North Sotho-speaking residents of the Lowveld of Northeastern South Africa.  Much of this area of Limpopo Province was incorporated in 1926 into the present Kruger National Park. Many readers-like this one-personally unfamiliar with this area of South Africa will benefit from reading the “Author’s Notes” at the end of the novel (pages 361-372) for a description of the larger historical context. The book “is the story of a talented . . .

Caminata, A Journey By Lori DiPrete Brown (Honduras 1983-85) Global Reflections Press $10.50 (paperback); $3.99 (Kindle) 227 pages 2013 Reviewed by Dennis Harrison-Noonan (Costa Rica 1978-80) In her first published work of fiction, Caminata, A Journey Lori DiPrete Brown tells the story Beth Pellegrino and her first year after college living and  working with Mother Maria and the Sister of the Living Cross in an orphanage in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Her story begins on the day she arrives in Honduras.  We meet the girls of the house where she will serve as their encargada. We are introduced to Luz, Felicia, Rosa and Vera, 4 teenage girls whose journey to find their roots will engage Beth in her own pilgrimage of faith and personal discovery. The author is thorough in offering answers to questions that we as curious readers have concerning Beth’s decision to leave her college love, Jake, her comfortable lifestyle . . .

[By Heart is a series on the Atlantic Blog edited by Joe Fassler in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. Here is the last by Fassler and Shacochis. Joe Fassler: Is a writer obligated to address the way that powerful institutions affect how we live and what we feel? Or is it enough to conjure life on the scale of garden, bed, and kitchen table? Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, is more qualified than most to answer these questions, to sort out the relationship between what he calls “the literature of political experience” versus “the literature of domestic experience.” For years, he wrote the “Dining In” column for GQ-short, wistful celebrations of the meals prepared and shared with a beloved woman. (He collected these essays, which include recipes, in a book aptly titled Domesticity.) But Shacochis’s fiction, and his globe-trotting work as a . . .

Leopards at My Door, Peace Corps Tanzania 1966-1967 by Harriet Hayes Denison (Tanzania 1966-67) Powell’s Espresso Books, $15 236 pages 2013 Reviewed by Deidre Swesnik (Mali 1996-98) Many Peace Corps stories are filled with hilarious and embarrassing food moments.  And Harriet Denison doesn’t disappoint with hers.  At the very beginning of Leopards at My Door, Harriet gets dropped off by the Peace Corps Land Rover at her home for the next two years, a secondary school in the relatively bustling town of Mwanza, Tanzania.  Right away, she meets Mrs. Makonde, the beloved headmistress of the school, and gets a quick tour of the grounds.  Then it’s onto lunch. At lunch with Mrs. Makonde I was self-conscious, trying to please, impress and chat all at once.  Politely, I choked down a very spicy bite of tongue stew with rice and decided we’d better settle the housing quickly.  You know tongue is . . .

The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis (Eastern Caribbean 1975–76) Atlantic Monthly Press $28.00 713 pages 2013 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000-02, Madagascar 2002-03) WITH THE WIDELY HERALDED release of his first novel since 1993’s National Book Award Finalist Swimming in the Volcano, Bob Shacochis has managed to make dead one of the livelier discussion points that’s unified Peace Corps writers for the better part of the past two decades: “What’s up with Bob, anyone seen him?” “One assumes he’s still in New Mexico, working on that crazy, alleged book.” The crazy, alleged book long ago became mythological. “I heard it’s about a zombie in Haiti.” “Haiti? I heard it was set in Croatia.” It’s been widely assumed Shacochis had waded into a literary quagmire, drowned himself in a stubborn attempt at an overreaching Ur text, a quixotic journey to write the whole history of some . . .