Peace Corps Writers Awards

Taking Stock of two decades of work by Tom Bissell. In 2022, Peace Corps Writers recognized him as the Writer of the Year.

By Steven Boyd Saum

Tom Bissell photo courtesy Penguin Random House

It was at the Downtown Bookfest in Los Angeles that I met Tom Bissell half a dozen years ago. Along with celebrating “Literary LA: Places, Spaces, and Faces” and the independent book scene, some of us read tributes to writers the community had lost in the past year—poets and fictioneers, tellers of true stories and writers of screenplays. I found myself talking with Bissell about a living writer we both knew and admired, Ron Hansen—whom I had worked with on editing a magazine for a decade, and who has been a finalist for the National Book Award and is a deacon in the Catholic church. For Bissell, the timing was interesting; he had just published Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve, a book tracing journeys to understand Christianity and the faith Bissell had lost at age 16. “What Christianity promises, I do not understand,” Bissell writes in the last chapter of Apostle. “What its god could possibly want, I have never been able to imagine.”

Ah — but what Bissell has imagined, and what other journeys he has undertaken as a writer! Those efforts have garnered him a Guggenheim, the Rome Prize, the Anna Akhmatova Prize, honors from the Writers Guild of America, as well as previous recognition from Peace Corps Writers for best travel book for Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia. In that 2003 book, his first, he sought to fathom the geography and history of the Aral Sea and the lands surrounding it — a part of the world Bissell had come to know serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan in 1996.

More on that in a moment. First, a quick synopsis of Bissell’s literary ascent. Born in 1974 and raised in Escanaba, Michigan, he is a writer who once upon a time hardly seemed destined to finish high school. His father was a Vietnam vet who had served in the Marines with Philip Caputo, who went on to pen a landmark memoir of the war and many books since. Young Tom got encouragement and advice from Caputo as well as writer Jim Harrison. Bissell became the would-be writer who headed for community college and, with coaxing from a professor there, wound up at the Bennington Summer Writers Workshop and worked with writer Bob Shacochis. Bissell followed that up by becoming the would-be writer who struck out with every application to MFA programs after finishing college at Michigan State. Having had one of his classes visited by a woman who had been in the Peace Corps, Bissell wrote Shacochis — who had served in the Peace Corps in the Eastern Caribbean 1975–76 — asking if he, too, should join. Shacochis sent back a postcard with a one-word answer: “Yes.”

Off to Uzbekistan Bissell went, a few years after that country achieved independence. But Bissell left Peace Corps service early, after suffering physical ailments and grappling with severe depression. Next failure: being turned down for a job at the local paper mill. But he gained a foothold in the literary world through an internship at Harper’s.

 “My entire career has just been an accidental stumble from one way to make a living as a writer to another,” Tom Bissell once told an interviewer. Photo courtesy Penguin/Random House

A few milestones on the literary journey since: true stories and fiction in multiple best-of-the-year collections, screenplays and more than a dozen video game scripts, and books of imagination and empathy. Among those books, of which there are ten or so to date: The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (2007), in which father and son travel together to Vietnam. There are Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2010) and Magic Hours: Essays On Creators and Creation (2012) — which includes a marvelous essay I’ve shared with aspiring writers, “Escanaba’s Magic Hour: Movies, Robot Deer, and the American Small Town.” And there is the hilarious memoir he co-wrote with actor Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life inside ‘The Room’, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, which appeared in 2013 and was adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film starring James Franco. Julia Loktey and Werner Herzog have also made Bissell’s work into films.

Brashness and dark humor are part and parcel of Bissell’s prose. And whether it’s his fiction or nonfiction, I’ll find myself thinking time and again, Careful now, somebody’s likely to get hurt! And they do.

Brashness and dark humor are part and parcel of Bissell’s prose. And whether it’s his fiction or nonfiction, I’ll find myself thinking time and again, “Careful now, somebody’s likely to get hurt!” And they do.

As for what brings Bissell writer-of-the-year accolades from Peace Corps Writers: Recognition for his most recent collection of stories, Creative Types (2021), an exploration in fiction in which those peripheral creative types don’t tend to come off looking so good. To wit: an assistant to James Franco (“The Hack”); a producer of reality TV; a flailing travel writer; a broken-down writer having a fling in Estonia (“Love Story, with Cocaine”); and a pair of newish parents in LaLa Land who try to liven up their marriage by hiring a sex worker for a ménage à trois.

Bissell’s work for the screen has been on display of late, too: For Apple TV+ he co-created the television series The Mosquito Coast, which debuted in 2021 and is based on the renowned book by writer Paul Theroux, who served as a Volunteer in Malawi 1963–65.

Writer's work: Tom Bissell co-created “The Mosquito Coast” for television, co-wrote the video game “Uncharted 4: A Thief's End,” and has been tapped to work on “Star Wars: Andor.” 

So what’s next for Bissell? Perhaps it’s helpful to keep in mind what he confided to Publishers Weekly a while back: “My entire career has just been an accidental stumble from one way to make a living as a writer to another.” So don’t look for another story collection right away. Perhaps look for him in a galaxy far, far away: He’s been tapped to join the writers for the next season of the series Star Wars: Andor, which streams on Disney+. As showrunner Tony Gilroy put it, “Tom Bissell is a really cool and really, really interesting, versatile, really good writer.” No argument here. Also in Bissell’s favor, for this gig: “A very, very, very big Star Wars fan.”

This essay appears in the Winter 2023 edition of WorldView Magazine.

In 1989, returned Volunteers Marian Haley Beil and John Coyne embarked on a project that has evolved into the digital Peace Corps Worldwide, an affiliate group of National Peace Corps Association. They also founded Peace Corps Writers, publishing books by authors in the Peace Corps community. Read about the rest of the writers recognized with 2022 Peace Corps Writers awards here. 

The people’s writer, love and marriage spats in Kazakhstan, mountain gorillas in Rwanda, a C-section by flashlight in Paraguay, and an epic journey by bicycle

We make sense of the world and our interwoven lives through stories. Some of these find form years later as books — and they’ve launched more than a few literary careers. In 1989, returned Volunteers Marian Haley Beil and John Coyne embarked on a project that has evolved into the digital Peace Corps Worldwide, an affiliate group of National Peace Corps Association. They also founded Peace Corps Writers, publishing books by authors in the Peace Corps community. In 2022 they recognized the following writers and works with Peace Corps Writers awards.

The Writer of the Year Award recognizes the work of Tom Bissell. Read an essay on him by Steven Boyd Saum here.

Paul Cowan Award for Best Work of Nonfiction

Michael Gold: The People’s Writer

Patrick Chura

SUNY Press

Michael Gold earned recognition as the People's Writer — then disappeared from the canon. Photo via Wikicommons.

In the very last pages of his story of the life of Michael Gold, Patrick Chura writes: “Gold managed the challenge of proving the existence of another America, and how difficult it made his life.” This biography brings to light, as Michael Gold did, an insidious, anti-democratic thread in America—a long historical strain of racism, classism, and anti-Semitism lying in wait for a leader to tap into that vein of ugliness.

In addition to a mastery of research, synthesis, analysis, compassion, and fluid prose in vividly bringing to us the life and struggles of Michael Gold, Chura has told the inside story of “another America”—one in which those of us who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s were fearful that the political secrets of our parents would be revealed to our more conventional playmates and the surrounding community. An avowed and uncompromising Marxist, Gold has fallen from the literary canon and political history of America, despite his major contributions. In writing of him, Chura has also told the story of my parents and people like them, who dedicated their lives to making a better, more equitable nation, and suffered as a result of their beliefs and actions.

Chura himself served as a Volunteer in Lithuania 1992–94 and is a professor of English at University of Akron, where he teaches 19th- and 20th-century American literature and cultural studies.

—Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963–65)

Read Marnie Mueller’s full review in the previous edition of WorldView. 

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Peace Corps Memoir 

Love and Latrines in the Land of Spiderweb Lace

A Peace Corps Memoir

Mary Lou Shefsky

Blurb

Mary Lou Shefsky served as a health education Volunteer in Paraguay 1974–76. Among the experiences she writes of: assisting as a doctor in a rural health center performed an emergency C-section, using only local anesthetic. “My job would be to hold the flashlight on this dark, rainy morning,” she writes, “because the town’s generator only operated a few hours each evening.” Paraguay was a dictatorship at the time; Shefsky adapted to life under those political circumstances. She worked on a sanitation project and appeared with fellow Volunteer (and future husband) Stephen and a group of schoolchildren on national television to sing “The Hookworm Song.”

Shefsky went on to earn a master’s in public health from Yale and spent decades working in community health, farm worker housing development, and teaching. She and Stephen have returned to Paraguay multiple times over the decades.

Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award 

I Miss the Rain in Africa

Peace Corps as a Third Act

Nancy Daniel Wesson

Modern History Press

“When the rain arrives, it is mythic,” writes Nancy Wesson of her time in Gulu, northern Uganda 2011–13. “No polite, spitting rain this. It is glorious, torrential, and loud in its own right, but rains here don’t usually come alone. Soul-rattling thunder accompanies lightning strikes that kill hundreds every year — entire schoolrooms of children at once. Lake Victoria, near Entebbe, boasts the highest number of lightning strikes in the world according to Google Maps.”

Wesson grew up in Louisiana and left a successful consulting business to serve as a Volunteer at age 64, when many would be preparing to head into retirement. This memoir traces her experiences as a Volunteer and returning to the U.S. — and completing a book very different from the one she set out to write. The book earned a Silver Nautilus Award for its writing about world cultures’ growth and development.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Third Goal Effort

Lucky

An African Student, An American Dream, and a Long Bike Ride

Brooke Marshall

Atramental Publishing

“In the summer of 2018, I rode a bike named Lucky from Raleigh to Seattle,” Brooke Marshall writes. “I covered 5,085 miles in a little over three months, solo.” It was an epic journey in its own right—and one with a purpose.

While serving as a Volunteer in Malawi 2013–15, Marshall “met a lot of talented students who wanted to go to college, but couldn’t afford it.” She helped some apply for study at universities abroad; two benefited from a foundation scholarship program. The next year, she helped students apply to some 25 schools, building contacts with admissions counselors at institutions that potentially offered full scholarships for international students. She also successfully petitioned Educational Testing Service, which administers the Test of English as a Foreign Language, to offer a non-computer-based version of the test, to make the test accessible — and fairer — to students who didn’t have regular access to required tech.

All that is prelude to the journey at the heart of Lucky. After Marshall returned to the U.S., she created the Represent Foundation and embarked on that bike tour, during which she met with admissions counselors at 18 universities. She told them about the students in the village where she taught and of their potential. She raised funds to help students pursue their education in Malawi — where the funding goes farther, and educational opportunities more closely within reach.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Young Adult Fiction

The Adventures of Mayana

Falling Off the Edge of the Earth

David Perry

Independently Published

David Perry (Belize 1985–87) tells 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 into 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 who speaks only in parables. He helps Mayana use her newfound magic powers to fight monsters and witches and to attempt to find her
way home.

This is Perry’s first novel. For more than 30 years he has taught and served as an educational administrator. He has also returned to Belize regularly over the years with his wife, Anaceli, who calls that country home.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Short Story Collection

A Husband and Wife Are One Satan

Stories

Jeff Fearnside

Orison Books

This slim collection by Jeff Fearnside (Kazakhstan 2002–04) comprises five stories set in Kazakhstan. Each story is a gem and focuses on a unique aspect of Kazakh life. “Accomplices to a Tradition” illuminates the practice of bride stealing; a woman is, essentially, kidnapped by a man and then, if accepted by his family, must marry him. On display here: police corruption; tensions between ethnic Russians, such as the narrator of the story, and ethnic Kazakhs; and the ubiquity of the vodka bottle.

The title story delves into the lives of customers in a village café operated by Raim and Railya, an ethnic Tatar couple. There is Kolya, a Russian Christian, who is married but comes to the café with his girlfriend; Murat, a Kazakh Muslim and his Russian friend, Tikhan; a pair of teenage girls looking for husbands; and an older, widowed alcoholic. Raim and Railya discover that their business becomes more robust when they argue loudly in front of their customers, providing endless entertainment, and they each give as good as they get. (The title of the story comes from a saying that means, essentially, “It takes two to tango.”) The plot takes a darker turn  when the arguments get out of hand.

Some stories touch on the changes in Kazakhstan over the years, from its contributions to the Great Patriotic War to its independence after the collapse of the USSR. Traditions and struggles persist. It is gratifying to read about them in the hands of a skillful writer like Fearnside. •

—Clifford Garstang (Korea 1976–77)

Maria Thomas Award for Best Book of Fiction 

A Thousand Points of Light

Marc-Vincent Jackson

Page Publishing

After three decades of teaching languages in the U.S. and elsewhere, Marc-Vincent Jackson (Senegal 1986–89) has published his debut novel, a tale of interwoven lives in Senegal in the 1980s. The story centers on Fatou, an outcast Senegalese woman. “To start at the beginning,” says one narrator, “that is not such a long time ago; stories and Africa have the same age. Since we all go so far back, history is our life; our pasts and presents are the same. I come from a long line of griots, so I know the history of the world and everyone in it. Thus, I know who I am and what I must do to live my history. I know, in this way, everyone. But because I love Fatou, it is her story I know the best.”

The novel is inspired by Jackson’s Peace Corps service during the presidency of George H.W. Bush — when the phrase “a thousand points of light” widely entered the national lexicon.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Travel Book

Rwanda and the Mountain Gorillas

Steve Kaffen

Independently Published

Land of a Thousand Hills — and the best tea in the world. Photo by Steve Kaffen

Landlocked Rwanda, in the Great Rift Valley, is one of Africa’s smallest and most densely populated countries, and one of its most diverse. Nicknamed “Land of a Thousand Hills,” the country is blanketed with rolling farmland. Travel writer Steve Kaffen (Russia 1994–96) notes that it is also home to Volcanoes National Park — with mountain gorillas in the higher elevations and golden monkeys down below — and Nyungwe National Park rainforest, where sources of both the Nile and Congo Rivers can be found. The book includes more than 150 original photos.

Throughout the country are memorials to the victims of the genocide in spring 1994. Offsetting the trauma is the resilience of Rwanda’s warm and outgoing population. Their desire for stability and solidarity is exemplified by umaganda, a morning of public service on the last Saturday of the month when all Rwandans engage in volunteer work for the betterment of their communities.

Marian Haley Beil Award for Best Book Reviews

D.W. Jefferson

This award goes to D.W. Jefferson for his body of work, which includes more than 30 insightful reviews for Peace Corps Worldwide. Jefferson also assists authors publishing with the Peace Corps Writers imprint. He served as a Volunteer in El Salvador 1974–76 and in Costa Rica 1976–77. He has worked as a software engineer, taught programming and database management, worked as a Spanish language translator and interpreter, and is a longtime member of the RPCVs of Wisconsin-Madison, a group known by returned Volunteers around the world for publishing the annual Peace Corps International Calendar.

See more about books in this section at peacecorpsworldwide.org.

The most recent Peace Corps Writers awards: love in Peru, the world’s biggest owl, a murder trial in Tanzania, and the lifetime contributions of a novelist whose characters meet racism with courage and love

Photo: Persian man smoking. From The Face of Iran Before by photographer Dennis Briskin

BAKED INTO THE MISSION of the whole Peace Corps experience is the work of telling stories: of listening, catching, giving voice and shape and form with a sense of fidelity to people and place, and having an awareness of audience.

Nurturing stories from the Peace Corps community in words and images can be a way to foster understanding and empathy, stuff lately in short supply. Back in 1989, returned Volunteers Marian Haley Beil and John Coyne launched a print publication that has grown into the digital environ known as Peace Corps Worldwide, an affiliate group of National Peace Corps Association. They also launched Peace Corps Writers, publishing books by authors in the Peace Corps community. In 2021 they recognized the following books with Peace Corps Writers awards.

The current Writer of the Year Award pays tribute to the lifetime of work by Mildred D. Taylor, who has brought to a close a series for young readers that spanned decades. Read an essay on Taylor by John Coyne here.

Paul Cowan Award for Best Work of Nonfiction

Every Hill a Burial Place

The Peace Corps Murder Trial in East Africa

Peter H. Reid 

University Press of Kentucky

In March 1966, outside a small village in Tanzania, Peace Corps Volunteer Peppy Kinsey died when she fell from a rocky hill where she and her husband of 16 months were picnicking. Bill Kinsey, also a Volunteer and schoolteacher, said it was a tragic accident. Tanzanian eyewitnesses reported that the couple had been arguing, then struggling. Bill Kinsey was arrested shortly after by Tanzanian police and charged with murder.

The trial took place in Mwanza, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Tanzania had been independent only five years, its legal system taking shape. The Peace Corps itself was less than five years old. Country director Paul Sack faced hard questions about the organization’s obligations to the deceased Peppy and her family — and to Bill, now on trial. In Washington, new Peace Corps Director Jack Vaughn grappled with those same questions.

Peter Reid, a Peace Corps teacher in Mwanza at the time and later a public interest lawyer in California, documents the events and the actions of a wide array of players, both American and African, through extensive interviews, Peace Corps documents, and detailed notes kept by many key players. 

—John Ratigan (Tanzania 1964–66)

Peace Corps Writers Special Book Award

Owls of the Eastern Ice

A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl

Jonathan Slaght 

Macmillan

“I saw my first Blakiston’s fish owl in the Russian province of Primorye, a coastal talon of land hooking south into the belly of Northeast Asia,” Jonathan Slaght writes. “No scientist had seen a Blakiston’s fish owl so far south in a hundred years.” Slaght was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Russian Far East (1999–2002) when he spotted this enormous, elusive, and panicked bird. His subsequent research and account of tracking these owls shapes an exhilarating exploration.

Accolades for Owls include being named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and Best Nature Book of the Year from The Times of London; being longlisted for the National Book Award; winning the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction; and receiving many best book of the year listings.

Read an excerpt from Owls of the Eastern Ice here.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Book of Photography

Iran Before

By Dennis Briskin 

Independently Published

Dennis Briskin made these photographs of people in central Iran while living there during the years 1967–69. He calls it the face of Iran (a diverse, colorful nation) because he used black-and-white film to record the surface of what caught his attention that he thought worth saving. Locations include Arak, Hamadan, Kashan, Esfahan, and Tehran. This book follows and is a companion to the 2019 book, Iran Before…

When he began photographing in Iran, Briskin had six months’ experience with his first 35mm camera and no formal training in photography. He grew up avidly reading the photojournalism magazines Look and Life. See a gallery of Briskin’s photography from The Face of Iran Before… here.

Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award

Between Inca Walls

A Peace Corps Memoir

By Evelyn Kohl LaTorre 

She Writes Press

Raised in Montana by devout Catholic parents, in 1964 Evelyn Kohl LaTorre arrived in Abancay, Peru, to begin two years of Peace Corps service. She and her roommate, Marie, worked in a hospital, started 4-H clubs, attended campesino meetings, and taught PE in a school with a dirt floor.

Evelyn also fell in love with Antonio, a local college student, which she confessed to a priest. “Say three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers and go in peace,” he told her. The couple wed in a civil ceremony followed by a religious ceremony with a few of Antonio’s family and friends. They emerged from a 15th-century Spanish chapel and ran laughing down a centuries-old cobblestone street, “between the sturdy granite Inca walls that supported the big stone cathedral and the chapel behind it.” Reviewer Mark D. Walker notes that photos and a map help bring the author’s story to life.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Young Adult Fiction

Bright Shining World

By Josh Swiller 

Knopf Books for Young Readers

A novel about young people coming of age in a chaotic and disturbing world could hardly be more timely, notes Peter Deekle in his review of this book, citing this passage: “Anyone could feel — how battered people were by the rising apocalyptic tide, how deeply they wanted to just go to sleep and wake up in a better place.” Teen protagonist Wallace Cole is deprived of care and attention from his career-driven father. Jackduke Energy, a dominant regional power-generating enterprise, employs Wallace’s father and provides a context for Wallace and his classmates to take action and confront the circumstances affecting their community.

Author Josh Swiller served as a Volunteer in Zambia 1994–96 and credits being a member of the Deaf community for his resilience. He demonstrates an acute sensitivity to the internal motivations and interpersonal interactions of his characters.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Children’s Book About a Peace Corps Country

We Are Akan

Our People and Our Kingdom in the Rainforest — Ghana, 1807

By Dorothy Brown Soper. Illustrated by James Cloutier 

Luminare Press

A work of historical fiction that follows three months in the lives of the boys Kwame, Kwaku, and Baako, ages 11–13, who live in and near the fictional town of Tanoso in the Asante Kingdom. Theirs is a richly illustrated story set in 1807 — when the kingdom faces rebellion and the decline of its role in the Atlantic slave trade. The boys balance the life they know with new possibilities for their future.

As a Volunteer in Ghana 1962–65, Dorothy Soper taught French to Akan students. Returning to the U.S., she earned an M.A. in African history at UCLA and developed units on African culture and history for elementary school classes. James Cloutier served as a Volunteer in Kenya (1962–65), where he created audiovisual materials to train land recipients to become cash crop farmers. Today he is an artist in Oregon; for this project he created two maps and over 90 illustrations of people, daily life, and celebrations.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Peace Corps Memoir 

In Search of Pink Flamingos

A Woman’s Quest for Forgiveness and Unconditional Love

Susan E. Greisen 

Sidekick Press

At age 19, certified practical nurse Susan Greisen left behind the farmlands of Nebraska for Zorgowee, Liberia, where she served as a Volunteer 1971–73. She introduced prenatal and well-baby clinics and formed a relationship with the head midwife in the area, Bendu. She taught classes for midwives and provided basic supplies. Reviewer Cynthia Mosca lauds the gumption the author displays, while Greisen’s parents offer criticism and a message that boils down to: Follow your passion, but get married and become a farmer’s wife. Instead, Greisen went on to serve as a Volunteer again, in Tonga (1973–74). She did not become a farmer’s wife, either. An interracial romance led Greisen’s parents to disown her.

Maria Thomas Award for Best Book of Fiction

Streets of Golfito

By Jim LaBate 

Mohawk River Press

Golfito is the town in Costa Rica where Jim LaBate served as a Volunteer 1974–75. This novel features a character named Jim, newly arrived to begin Peace Corps service there. Advised to adopt a locally familiar name, he takes the moniker Diego. He meets Lilli, a high school girl who faces a life-changing trauma when she is raped by a U.S. high school student who departs the country the next day. Diego and Christina, a Peace Corps nurse, assist Lilli through the months ahead. The town of Golfito itself — home to the American Fruit Company — is described in vivid detail, notes reviewer Jim Skelton.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Book of Poetry

In the Coral Reef of the Market

By Earl Carlton Huband 

Main Street Rag

During his third year as a Volunteer in Oman (1975–79), Earl Huband worked in Salalah, the capital of Oman’s southern district. These poems are based on that Peace Corps experience, notes reviewer D.W. Jefferson, who lauds the honesty and grace of the poems in this chapbook.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Short Story Collection 

A Cup of Stars

By Joseph Monninger 

Wood Heat Press

Since serving as a Volunteer in Burkina Faso (1975–77), Joseph Monninger has written books of fiction and nonfiction, and young adult novels. Now comes a collection of tightly written stories from across the years. 

This story appears in the special 2022 Books Edition of WorldView magazine. Read more about these books and others at Peace Corps Worldwide.

Dreams and disillusionment. A 3,000-mile ultramarathon and a library in a Mayan village. Catching up with books recognized with the Peace Corps Writers Awards.

Baked into the mission of the whole Peace Corps experience is the work of telling stories: of listening, catching, giving voice and shape and form with a sense of fidelity to people and place, and an awareness of audience. Nurturing stories from the Peace Corps community in words and images can be a way to foster understanding and empathy, stuff lately in short supply. Back in 1989, returned Volunteers John Coyne and Marian Haley Beil launched a print publication that has grown into the digital environment known as Peace Corps Worldwide, which is an affiliate group of National Peace Corps Association. They also began publishing books by Peace Corps writers. In 2020 they recognized the following books with Peace Corps Writers awards.

Moritz Thomsen Award for Best Book about the Peace Corps Experience
Eradicating Smallpox in Ethiopia
Peace Corps Volunteers’ Accounts of Their Adventures, Challenges, and Achievements
(Peace Corps Writers)

Read more in this review by Barry Hillenbrand.

Rowland Scherman Award for Best Book of Photography
Bill Owens
Altamont 1969
(Damiani)

December 1969. Bill Owens is working as a photographer for the Livermore Independent when friend Beth Bagby, another photojournalist who shoots for AP, calls and asks if he wants to join her and photograph the free concert at the Altamont Speedway, in hills to the east of San Francisco Bay, with the Rolling Stones as headliners. It will be the West Coast answer to Woodstock. Owens’s editors give him the day off in exchange for giving them dibs on photos.

Saturday morning, December 6: Owens rides to Altamont on his motorcycle. Speaking of bikes: Hells Angels are providing security for the show and are being paid in beer. Three hundred thousand people show up at a venue where preparation had begun only two days before.

On the bill with the Stones: Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers, plus Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The Grateful Dead are scheduled to play too, but don’t. Acid, wine, and mayhem are there aplenty.

Bug, beer, flag — and a “sea of people with no borders, no limits, and no shepherds,” writes Sasha Frere-Jones. “The only protection for the band was a comical piece of sisal twine stretched across the stage.” The twine didn’t last long. Photo by Bill Owens.

Perched in a sound tower with two Nikons, three lenses, 13 rolls of film, a sandwich, and a jar of water, Owens shoots the scene: hippies in corduroy and afghans and birthday suits, dancers and trippers, Mick Jagger led by cops through the crowd, Hells Angels beating a man with a pool cue. When a biker threatens to clobber Owens with a pipe wrench and break his effing skull unless he comes down, our intrepid photog flashes his press card. The Angel is not impressed.

Owens decides it’s time to bail. Before the day is done, one Black man, Meredith Hunter, is stabbed to death. Another man tripping on acid drowns in an irrigation ditch; two more are killed in a hit-and-run. 

Music, acid, wine, vioolence. Photo by Bill Owens.

Four decades later comes Altamont 1969, with new and previously unpublished photographs from that day. Some call it rock ’n’ roll’s darkest hour, the end of the peace and love ’60s. Back in the day, Bill Owens published some photos under a pseudonym; he didn’t want the Hells Angels coming for him or his family, thinking he had photographed the murder of Hunter. Indeed, when Owens and friend Beth Bagby loaned some negatives to a married couple who planned to publish a book, that couple’s house was burglarized, the negatives stolen. Some of the negatives that survived are what make up this book.

Faces in the crowd. Photo by Bill Owens.

Owens served as a Volunteer in Jamaica 1964–66, an experience that launched his career in photography. He made a name for himself as a photographer with the big-thinking and warmhearted series Suburbia — profoundly different than the work in Altamont. He has also made a name for himself with Buffalo Bill’s Brewery as a pioneer in the craft beer movement. His encore to that: trailblazing work in craft distilling.

Paul Cowan Award for Best Book of Nonfiction
Charles B. Kastner
Race across America: Eddie Gardner and the Great Bunion Derbies
(Syracuse University Press)

Eddie Gardner, distance runner extraordinaire. Solomon Sir Jones Films, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Charles Kastner traces Eddie “the Sheik” Gardner’s remarkable journey from his birth in 1897 in Birmingham, Alabama, to his success in Seattle as one of the top long-distance runners in the Northwest, and finally to his participation in two transcontinental footraces where he risked his life: As a Black man, he faced a barrage of harassment for having the audacity to compete with white runners. Kastner shows how Gardner’s participation became a way to protest the endemic racism he faced, heralding the future of nonviolent efforts that would be instrumental to the civil rights movement. Kastner served as a Volunteer in the Seychelles 1980–82.

The course: East to West, with particular peril for a Black man running through the South. Map courtesy Joseph Stoll, Syracuse University Cartographic Lab.

From the book: On April 23, 1929, the bunion derby returned to the Jim Crow South. On that day, Eddie “the Sheik” Gardner, an African American runner from Seattle, Washington, was leading the bunion derby across the Free Bridge over the Mississippi River that separated Illinois from Missouri. He was flying, blazing over the short, by derby standards, twenty-two-mile course at a sub-three-hour marathon pace.

“First into St. Louis in Cross Country Race”—with the American flag on his chest. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 24, 1929.

Eddie was wearing the distinctive outfit that earned him his nickname, a white towel tied around his head and a white sleeveless shirt and white shorts, but he had added something new to his outfit. Below his racing number, “165,” he had sewn an American flag, a reminder to all who saw him run that he was an American and, that day, the leader of the greatest footrace in the world. He was setting himself up for another collision with southern segregation.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Short Story Collection
Kristen Roupenian
You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories
(Gallery/Scout Press)

Spanning a range of genres and topics — from the very mundane to the murderous and supernatural—these are tales of sex and punishment, guilt and anger, the pleasure and terror of inflicting and experiencing pain. “Cat Person,” published in the New Yorker, garnered deserved acclaim. Reviewer Marnie Mueller zeroed in on the collection’s narrative pace, edgy dialogue, descriptive power, and dark humor. The stories fascinate and repel, revolt and arouse, scare and delight in equal measure. As a collection, they point a finger at you, dear reader, daring you to feel uncomfortable — or worse, understood — as if to say, “You want this, right? You know you want this.” Roupenian served as a Volunteer in Kenya 2003–05. She was named to the inaugural National Peace Corps Association “40 Under 40” list, published in our spring 2020 edition; her fiction has appeared in these pages as well.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Peace Corps Memoir
Nancy Heil Knor
Woven: A Peace Corps Adventure Spun with Faith, Laughter, and Love 
(Peace Corps Writers)

Through intimate first-person accounts and letters, Woven invites readers to accompany Knor on her journey into the jungles of Belize, where she served as a Volunteer 1989–91. She introduces readers to Mayan families she comes to love; she seeks deeper understanding of the dynamics of the K’ekchi Maya culture — and helps build a library.

Maria Thomas Award for Best Book of Fiction
William Siegel
With Kennedy in the Land of the Dead: A Novel of the 1960s
(Peace Corps Writers)

The novel begins on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas: November 22, 1963. Gilbert Stone, a Peace Corps Volunteer teacher in Ethiopia, returns home, shattered by the loss of his hero. In the years that follow, Stone struggles to integrate his Peace Corps experience and the trauma of Kennedy’s death. Siegel himself served as a Volunteer in Ethiopia 1962–64.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Book of Poetry
Bill Preston
Strange Beauty of the World: Poems
(Peace Corps Writers)

These poems invite reflection: on how past impinges on present, how events long ago inform who we are now; on paths taken and not taken, and unintended consequences of those choices. They ask us to bear witness to cruelty and injustice; to summon the creative imagination to resist the mundane, challenge the rehearsed response. They pay homage to beauty and its weird, wonderful diversity and expression. Preston served as a Volunteer in Thailand 1977–80.

Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Travel Book
Steve Kaffen
Europe by Bus: 50 Bus Trips and City Visits
(SK Journeys)

Through 50 journeys over a two-year period, traveler and prolific author Steve Kaffen — who served as a Volunteer in Russia 1994–96 and once met Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary hiking in the Himalayas — weaves together a fascinating travelogue with experiential guidance on how to explore Europe by bus — something that, in the age of COVID-19, suddenly belongs to another time.