Peace Corps Author Book Readings

Location:   Palmer House Hilton, PDR 16 on 5th Floor

Friday, August 6       9 a.m. - 6 p.m.

Saturday, August 7   9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Hear RPCVs read from the books they have written about their expereinces in Peace Corps and Life.

Author Bio and Reading Schedules:

Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1991-93) is the author of The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and a novel, Steal My Heart. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, and his stories, poems and essays have appeared in The Sun, Beloit Fiction Journal, Notre Dame Review, Atlanta Review, Shenandoah and other literary journals. Mark has also published journalism in The Washington Post, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Detroit Free Press and American Medical News. He is now an assistant professor of English at West Virginia University and lives with his wife, Julie, and daughters, Annabel and Rebecca, in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Readings:  Friday at 1 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m.

Rob Davidson (Grenada 1990-92) is the author of a book of short stories, FIELD OBSERVATIONS (Missouri, 2001), which won the 2002 Maria Thomas Fiction Award (sponsored by Peace Corps Writers). His stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, The Bryant Literary Review, and elsewhere. His first play, A DAY AT THE BRINEWORT, was recently produced by the Blue Room Theater in Chico, California. He is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Chico, where he teaches creative writing and American literature.

Readings:  Friday at 1:30 p.m. and Saturday at 10:30 a.m.

Sarah Erdman (Côte d'Ivoire 1998-00) is the daughter of a Foreign Service Officer who also was a Peace Corps Volunteer and grew up in seven countries, including Portugal, Israel, Yugoslavia, and Cyprus. After graduating with a history degree from Middlebury College in Vermont, Sarah served as a health volunteer in northern Côte d'Ivoire, an experience that is brilliantly retold in her first book, Nine Hills to Nambonkaha. Before publication, Sarah's Peace Corps story was selected for Border's "Original Voices," Booklist, and Barnes and Noble's "Discover Great New Writers" program. It also won a New York Times Editor's Choice award for travel literature, and was featured in a recent edition of Worldview. Nine Hills to Nambonkaha recently won the 2004 Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award presented annually at the NPCA Conference by PeaceCorpsWriters.org. Sarah is now a Peace Corps Placement Officer for Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Jordan The paperback edition of Nine Hills to Nambonkaha was released this month.

Readings:  Friday at 5 p.m. and Saturday at 12 p.m.

John C. Kennedy (Ghana 1965-68) was born in Lumberton, North Carolina and attended Ohio Northern University. He joined the Peace Corps in 1965 and taught secondary school mathematics in Peki, Ghana. After his Peace Corps service, he obtained a masters in mathematics, studying at the University of Illinois, where he also studied comparative education. Now retired, he taught mathematics and was a computer administrator with the Antilles Consolidated School System in Puerto Rico. Last year, he self-published a novel, Last Lorry to Mbordo.

Readings:  Friday at 2 p.m. and Saturday at 1 p.m.

Leita Kaldi (Senegal 1993-96) has published over fifty articles in magazines and newspapers, such as The Christian Science Monitor, The Miami Herald, The Boston Herald, Innovations: UNESCO Journal of Education (Geneva), and Jeune Afrique (Dakar). Leita won the RPCV Moritz Thomsen Award for Best Story of the Year in 1997, and first prize in the Sarasota Literary Association Contest. She is a former United Nations staff member, and served as Administrator of Hospital Albert Schweitzer in Haiti for five years before retiring in 2002.

Readings:  Friday at 6 p.m. and Saturday at 11:30 a.m.

Maureen Orth (Colombia 1964-66) has written for a number of major publications, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Esquire and Newsweek. Today she is a Special Correspondent to Vanity Fair magazine. One of the first women to write for Newsweek, Maureen won a National Magazine Award for group coverage of the arts. Maureen also took a leave of absence from Newsweek to be Italian director Lina Wertmuller's assistant on the film Seven Beauties, but then returned to journalism. She began to write for Vanity Fair in 1988 and among the people she has profiled was murder suspect Andrew Cunanan in the September 1997 issue. This was the first in-depth report on the man who killed Gianni Versace and served as the basis for her book, Vulgar Favors, published in 1999. Another of her articles--on Michael and Arianna Huffington--was nominated for a National Magazine Award in reporting. Prior to joining Vanity Fair Orth was a contributing editor at Vogue and a columnist for New York Woman. And prior to that, she was a senior editor for New York and New West magazines. Maureen graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in political science and after the Peace Corps earned her master's degree in documentary film and journalism from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her most recent book is The Importance of Being Famous: Behind the Scenes of the Celebrity-Industrial Complex.

Readings:  Friday at 4 p.m. and Saturday at 11 a.m.

Jerome Pohlen (Benin 1986-88) joined the Peace Corps after graduating from the University of Notre Dame. The experience convinced him to jettison his previous plans for a career in mechanical engineering to become an inner-city elementary school teacher. Later, while teaching in Chicago, he was hired to write middle-grade math curricula for a National Science Foundation grant at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 1994 he became the Editorial Director for Learning Resources, a Chicago-area educational publisher, and wrote travel essays in his free time. His first travel book, Oddball Illinois, was published in 2000. He has since written six additional titles in the "Oddball" series, with two more on the way. Currently he is a Senior Editor at Chicago Review Press, which specializes in general nonfiction and children's activity books.

Readings:  Friday at 3 p.m. and Saturday at 10 a.m.

Robert Rosenberg (Kyrgyzstan 1994-96) was born in Howell, New Jersey,
and attended Columbia University. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kyrgyzstan and afterward, through the Peace Corps Fellows program, lived and taught on the White Mountain Apache Reservation while earning his M.Ed. in Secondary Education at Northern Arizona University. In 1999 he took a
teaching position in Istanbul, arriving there five days before the massive earthquake. Recently he completed his MFA at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he was awarded both a Maytag Fellowship and a Teaching/Writing Fellowship. This is not Civilization, his first novel, has been selected as a Borders Bookstore Original Voices and a Book Sense July 2004 pick. Robert now lives in Arizona.

Readings:  Friday at 5:30 p.m. and Saturday at 1:30 p.m.

David Taylor (Mauritania 1983-85) writes about travel, culture and the environment for magazines, newspapers and documentaries. His work has appeared in Smithsonian, DoubleTake, Forbes Global, Village Voice and The Washington Post. After working as a science editor in agroforestry projects in Asia, he became a freelance writer, starting with development agencies and nonprofit organizations. His book Hunting 'Sang is being published by Algonquin. He has also written award-winning documentaries for The Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and National Geographic, as well as less exotic stuff. His short stories have appeared in various literary reviews and received a Literary Arts Film Award from Web Del Sol. He lives in Connecticut with his wife Lisa Smith.

Reading:  Friday at 3:30 p.m.

Andy Trincia (Romania 2002-2004) completed his service as a business volunteer on July 1. Prior to being a PCV, Trincia was senior vice president of a Los Angeles advertising and public relations firm, and previously worked in communications positions at Fidelity Investments and Wachovia Corporation. He is also a former newspaper reporter who rekindled his writing as a PCV, contributing regular dispatches, "A Volunteer's Life in Romania," for Peace Corps Writers, an online magazine, as well as articles for the alumni magazines of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a journalism degree, and Northeastern University in Boston, where he completed his MBA. Having been home only for a few weeks, Trincia is re-adjusting to life in America, looking for his next career move and currently residing in Manhattan Beach, California.

Readings:  Friday at 2:30 p.m. and Saturday at 3 p.m.

Philip Weiss is a New York writer and though not an RPCV, a member of the NPCA. He has worked for many years as a journalist, as a columnist for the New York Observer, a former contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Harper's and Esquire. He has published one novel and has recently published American Taboo, a book on the murder of one Peace Corps Volunteer by another in Tonga in 1976. He is currently at work on a book about New Guinea and Australia.

Readings:  Friday at 4:30 p.m. and Saturday at 12:30 p.m.

John Woods (Ethiopia 1965-1968) graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 (the year of the Free Speech Movement for those who remember the 60s) and has worked in book publishing since 1970. He was with Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) for 10 years and worked as an acquisitions editor in New York and San Francisco. He later worked with several other publishers, including John Wiley & Sons. He now has his own company, CWL Publishing Enterprises (www.cwlpub.com), a book packaging and production company started in 1994 and located in Madison, Wisconsin. He has developed the Briefcase Books series for McGraw-Hill, which includes 30 titles on basic business topics that have been translated into more than 15 languages. He has also developed 13 Complete Idiot's Guides and numerous other books for McGraw-Hill and other publishers. His company provides production services, taking projects from manuscript to ready-for-the-printer. His son Chris was a PCV in Kazakhstan from 1996 to 1998.