What Does Peace Corps Do for America?
Every Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV)’s experience is unique and challenging. Facing the unknown, learning a language (or two), developing sensitivity to very different cultures, growing new relationships, identifying and completing projects, and overcoming physical difficulties are but a few of the tasks that PCVs face. When they return home, their stories tend to revolve around the experiences they had during their service and the impact they had in the countries they served. But service in the Peace Corps also affects the United States in ways that are equally important to document. The Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Oral History Archival Project...
Literary Legacy
For as long as Peace Corps Volunteers have been sent to the remote corners of the world, they have brought back journals that capture day-to-day life in their communities, with all its ups and downs. Years and even decades later, these records give Returned Peace Corps Volunteers a way for them, and maybe a few loved ones, to relive the stories and contemplate the lessons learned from their service. But some of these journals go on to have a much larger reach as they are transformed into compelling memoirs, fiction, and other stories published professionally and even climbing to the...
A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey
This enthralling memoir from a former Peace Corps director follows the life of a curious and dedicated public servant, starting with her abandonment at age 3 and taking us through the next 76 exciting, joyful, and sometimes painful years of her life. Thankfully for the Peace Corps community, much of Jody Olsen’s life has included the agency, and her candid recollections are fascinating to read. But despite its title, A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey is as much about Olsen’s personal history as her professional one. She explores the dynamics of her childhood in a strict Mormon family, the...
Far from the Road: A Community Health Project in the Himalayas
The inspiring and dramatic events in Far from the Road unfolded half a century ago in the verdant, idyllic valley of Dhorpatan, at 9,000 feet elevation in Nepal. Ross Anthony, from Oklahoma City, a returned agricultural Volunteer, conceived the project alongside Nepal’s first NGO, Paropakar. With passion and persistence, “Ross the Boss” cobbled together shoestring-level funding and signed up Mary Murphy, a community health educator from suburban Washington, D.C. They recruited Stephen Bezruchka, a Stanford Medical School grad from Toronto, and were later joined by Mike Payne, a water systems engineer from Cleveland, Ohio. With ponies and porters, the team...
Endless Horizons
Paul Neville’s memoir of backpacking around Southeast Asia and South America more than fulfills the promise in his subtitle: A Global Backpacker’s Quest for Adventure, Connection, and Discovery. Readers will find this self-published effort a thoroughly professional product. Expect to enjoy an assiduously edited, excellently laid out, and beautifully written book. After two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tonga, Neville’s “festering travel bug”—a condition nearly universal among returned Volunteers—launches him into a year of vagabonding on a shoestring budget. Intermingled with vivid travelogue, he tries to explain why. There is novelty, of course. Bangkok, his first stop, is...
Other Rivers: A Chinese Education
I have been an admirer of Peter Hessler’s work since reading his first book, River Town, about his Peace Corps service at a Chinese university in the 1990s. I was particularly drawn to that book because of my own Peace Corps work in a Korean university and professional ties to China. Hessler wrote eloquently about his Peace Corps experience in a way that I think any returned Volunteer could relate to. Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, Hessler’s latest book about China, is just as interesting and satisfying as the three other books about the country he wrote as a journalist...
When a Picture Sells a Thousand Words
From an early age, many of us are told not to judge a book by its cover, yet we intuitively know that first impressions matter—maybe more than they should. While the power of a book lies in its storytelling, its narrative, its words, very often the thing that determines whether those words are plucked from the shelf of a local bookstore is a book’s cover. Something will always be lost in translation when distilling a 70,000-word narrative into a single page, but when a cover lands “just right,” the result can have an outsized impact. So what story is the...
Letter to a First-Time Peace Corps Writer
No matter who you are, sitting down to a blank page to try and tell the story of your life can be daunting. But I’m here to reassure you that, as a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, you have a great story to tell. The key question is where to start. Jacques Barzun, an accomplished writer and historian who taught at Columbia University, wrote that to become a writer you have to convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble—on paper, not eternal bronze—so let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. Just put it down, then...
A Life Lived in Books
Dan Pelzer started recording every book he read in 1962, when he arrived in Dharan, Nepal, as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and began a ritual of reading through the paperbacks in his Peace Corps book locker by the bright light of a Petromax kerosene pump lantern. Thus a lifelong passion for literature was sparked, which, with the help of Dan’s daughter Marci, has gone on to inspire untold numbers of people since his death in 2025 at the age of 92. After he passed away on July 1, Marci posted her father’s meticulously handwritten record of the 3,599 books he...
Pitch Perfect
These days, there are more pathways to publication than ever before: do-it-yourself, web publishing, print on demand, vanity presses, hybrid publishers, and indie presses, to name a few. But if you dream of seeing your book on the shelves of airport bookstores or featured on an endcap at Barnes & Noble, you’ll want to shoot for a deal with one of the “Big Five” publishers—Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Hachette Book Group, and Simon & Schuster—each of which has a multitude of genre-specific imprints. Breaking into traditional publishing can be daunting. Most Big Five publishers will not accept unsolicited manuscripts,...