A few notable works recognized with various Peace Corps Writer Awards for 2016. Next week the Peace Corps community will gather in Washington, DC for Peace Corps Connect to celebrate the agency’s 55 years. Activities will include panels and workshops featuring Peace Corps Writers. More.
The Maria Thomas Fiction Award for 2016 (named after novelist Maria Thomas [Roberta Worrick (Ethiopia 1971–73)], author of a well-reviewed novel and two short story collection, all set in Africa. She lost her life in August, 1989, while working in Ethiopia for a relief agency, in a plane crash that also killed Congressman Mickey Leland of Texas)
Landfall
by Ellen Urbani (Guatemala 1991-92)
Two mothers and their teenage daughters, whose lives collide in a fatal car crash, take turns narrating Ellen Urbani’s breathtaking novel, Landfall, set in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Eighteen-year-olds Rose and Rosebud have never met but they share a birth year, a name, and a bloody pair of sneakers. Rose’s quest to atone for the accident that kills Rosebud, a young woman so much like herself but for the color of her skin, unfolds alongside Rosebud’s battle to survive the devastating flooding in the Lower Ninth Ward and to find help for her unstable mother. These unforgettable characters give voice to the dead of the storm and, in a stunning twist, demonstrate how what we think we know can make us blind to what matters most.
The Best Travel Book for 2016 (first presented in 2001.)
Crocodile Love: Travel Tales from an Extended Honeymoon
by Joshua Berman (Nicaragua 1998-2000)
“We wanted to go to hot, intense places together, to cities where open markets breathed that sweaty, fish-gutty, trash-burning smell that clings to travelers’ memories forever. We had each whiffed it before, this odor of deep travel, but it was something else to embark as husband and wife to seek it together. We would pressure-cook our fragile new marriage, take it around the world, introduce it to new friends, and make it bubble and boil into everything we could be.” In Crocodile Love, travel writer Joshua Berman recounts the quests, encounters, and mishaps of the extended, round-the-world voluntourism honeymoon he took with his wife, Sutay. Both are returned Peace Corps Volunteers who decided on a long, epic trip before settling down in the suburbs. The book journeys through Pakistan, India, Ghana, The Gambia, and beyond.
The Award for Best Short Story Collection for 2016 (Given for the first time this year to recognize outstanding short stories written by RPCVs.)
King of the Gypsies: Stories
by Lenore Myka (Romania 1994-96)
Fiction. Set against a wild and haunting landscape, the short fiction in this collection spotlights the struggles of everyday individuals to overcome the ghosts they have inherited from Romania’s communist past. The book won BkMk’s G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, selected by PEN/Faulkner finalist Lorraine M. López, who writes, “Myka’s characters release uncountable fibers, connecting them to one another in the linked narratives, binding them to the harshly beguiling Romania they inhabit and that inhabits them.”
The Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience award for 2016 (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.)
M
arrying Santiago
by Suzanne Adam (Colombia 1964-66)
She hadn’t seen it coming. Her new Chilean husband changed his mind, or, rather, the military coup changed it. Instead of their relocating to her native California as planned, he now wanted to give his country a chance. That was over four decades ago. Raised surrounded by the lush landscape of Marin County, Suzanne Adam hadn’t expected to settle in Santiago, a city of over five million people, where she faced a series of daunting challenges: food shortages, a military dictatorship, heartbroken parents, maids and machismo. After a visit back home, she returned to Chile with a California redwood seedling in her pocket, and together they would push down their roots into that distant soil, where she discovered the truth in Wallace Stegner’s statement: “Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see the world afterwards.”
The Editors Special Award for 2016 (given to a writer in our community who has published a significant book that does not fit into any of our other awards categories, but deserves recognition.)
Meeting the Mantis: Searching for a Man in the Desert and Finding the Kalahari Bushmen
by John Ashford (Botswana 1990–92)
The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World
by Steven Radelet (Western Samoa 1981-83)
The untold story of the global poor today: A distinguished expert and advisor to developing nations reveals how we’ve reduced poverty, increased incomes, improved health, curbed violence, and spread democracy—and how to ensure the improvements continue.
Ben East Books 
Thank you for this. I was just looking for some good reads!
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