Uzbekistan

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“Writers from the Peace Corps” by John Coyne (Ethiopia)
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2022 Award for Writer of the Year
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A Writer Writes — “The Cotton Trenches of Uzbekistan”
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Uzbek Zero by Bea Hogan (Uzbekistan)
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Second Prize Peace Corps Fund Awards: “Samarkand Calling” by Beatrice Hogan (Uzbekistan)
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Tom Bissell (Uzbekistan 1996) in NYTIMES

“Writers from the Peace Corps” by John Coyne (Ethiopia)

  John writes — Since 1961, Peace Corps writers have used their volunteer service as source material for their fiction and nonfiction. Approximately 250,000 Americans have served in the Peace Corps. Of these volunteers and staff, more than 1,500 have published memoirs, novels, and poetry inspired by their experience. Many former volunteers have gone on to careers as creative writing teachers, journalists, and editors, while others have discovered a variety of jobs outside of publishing where their Peace Corps years have contributed to successful employment. A Peace Corps tour has proven to be a valuable experience — in terms of one’s craft and one’s professional career—for more than one college graduate. The first to write The first book to draw on the Peace Corps experience was written by Arnold Zeitlin (Ghana 1961–63), who had volunteered for the Peace Corps in 1961 after having been an Associated Press reporter. That book, . . .

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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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A Writer Writes — “The Cotton Trenches of Uzbekistan”

    by Beatrice Grabish Hogan (Uzbekistan 1992-94) Dispatch from Uzbekistan’s cotton campaign November 1993   On the fifth day of barf (Tajik for “snow”), the troops surrendered. The war, a.k.a. the cotton harvest, lasted eight weeks this year and yielded (only) 87% returns. I had watched my students pile into a 25-vehicle motorcade and wind around the mile-long university boulevard amidst handkerchief waving and cheers from teachers and other onlookers. Two days later, much to the horror and surprise of my women colleagues at Samarkand State University, I joined the students’ work camp. On October 5, I arrived at the collective farm called Guzelkent, about 40 kilometers outside the city limits. The place was a collection of brown-streaked, whitewashed houses made of mudbrick, rising like Oz out of acre upon acre of cotton fields. It was a scene framed by purple mountain peaks and a flawless blue sky. At . . .

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Uzbek Zero by Bea Hogan (Uzbekistan)

  Uzbek Zero by Bea Hogan (Uzbekistan 1992-94) • “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” It’s Peace Corps gospel, which had served the agency well as it spread throughout the developing world. But what happens when a country doesn’t want your help, and you’re sent there anyway? I found out, when the Peace Corps sent me to Uzbekistan in 1992. The Cold War had ended, and the Peace Corps was expanding into the former Communist countries of the Eastern Bloc. When the Soviet Union collapsed, in December 1991, James Baker, then secretary of state under George H.W. Bush, said he wanted to see 250 Peace Corps Volunteers on the ground within a year. Volunteers, he said, would provide “human capital” to help these countries transition to market economies, Baker said, and advance U.S. . . .

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Second Prize Peace Corps Fund Awards: “Samarkand Calling” by Beatrice Hogan (Uzbekistan)

  Beatrice Hogan served in the first group of Peace Corps Volunteers in Uzbekistan (1992-94), and in 2001, returned to the region as an International Reporting Project (IRP) Fellow. She’s worked as a book editor, a radio reporter, and a magazine researcher, and her work has appeared in More, Business 2.0 and Marie Claire, among other publications. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Georgetown and a master’s in international affairs from Columbia. • Samarkand Calling WE WERE IN UZBEKISTAN, heading for Bukhara, an historic city about four hours outside Samarkand, when a soldier flagged down our car with a white baton. My husband and I stared at each other nervously as our driver pulled into the checkpoint. I was in Central Asia on a month-long journalism fellowship; Kevin had come along as my photographer. The soldier demanded our passports and disappeared into a roadside shack. I realized that . . .

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Tom Bissell (Uzbekistan 1996) in NYTIMES

Tom Bissell (Uzbekistan 1996) wrote a review of Green on Blue by Elliot Ackerman in the New York Times Book Review Section, Sunday, March 1, 2015. In the review of this novel that is set in Afghanistan, Bissell writes: “I pondered my own brief 2001 excursion in Afghanistan, among Northern Alliance guerrillas with whom I could speak a bit thanks to my Peace Corps Uzbek.” Tom was a PCV for seven months in Uzbekistan before he ETed. In 2001, or thereabouts, Bissell convinced a magazine to send him back to Central Asia to investigate the Aral Sea’s destruction. There, he joins forces with a young Uzbek named Rustam, and together they make their often wild way through the ancient cities–Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara. Out of this experience came his nonfiction book, Chasing the Sea Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia. He has also written a collection of short . . .

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