Nancy Wesson’s ‘I Miss the Rain in Africa’ Wins Silver Nautilus Award

By Ernest Dempsey-

Modern History Press is proud to announce that its title I Miss the Rain in Africa: Peace Corps as a Third Act by Nancy Daniel Wesson has become a Nautilus Award Winner.

I Miss the Rain in Africa won the 2022 Silver Nautilus Award in the category of World-Cultures’ Transformational Growth & Development. The category, which falls in the general readership division, includes books that offer insightful perspectives on possible futures and how Humanity embraces its next steps.

Published in May 2021, Wesson’s book gives an autobiographical account of the author’s service and life as a Peace Corps Volunteer in post-war Northern Uganda. Her journey spans living in a radically different culture and environment and then returning home to reconcile a life that no longer “fits.” While the book took about a year to complete and was written in full by the fall of 2020, the pandemic delayed the release a bit.

The standard serving time as UN Peace Corps Volunteer is 27 months, but Nancy Wesson stayed longer to help a child she was sponsoring in school to get through his end-of-year exams. She lived in Uganda for a little over two years.

“My enduring takeaway remains living with gratitude and being fully present for life,” Nancy comments on her life in the African land.

I Miss the Rain in Africa summons the power of stepping into the void to reconfigure life and enter the wilderness of the uncharted territory of our own memories and psyche. The journey through the social life of personal foibles and family wounds synchronizes with the inner journey of mystical experiences. But what is special about the rain in Africa to make it into the book’s title?

“It is the most thunderous, monsoon-type of rain, eclipsing all else – bringing life to a halt,” says Nancy Wesson. She describes how rain in Africa is usually accompanied by the loss of electric power, and being cocooned in a dark house lit only by candle light, enveloped by the sound of the rain and thunder, creates a mystical, introspective experience.

Nancy Wesson’s books and articles are all online at her website https://nancywesson.com/.

How Dare We! Write, 2nd Edition [PB]

978-1-61599-683-4
$24.95
In stock
1
Product Details
UPC: 978-1-61599-683-4
Brand: Modern History Press
Binding: Paperback
Edition: 2nd
Author: Sherry Quan Lee
Pages: 266
Publication Date: 08/01/2022

How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse offers a much needed corrective to the usual dry and uninspired creative writing pedagogy. The collection asks us to consider questions, such as “What does it mean to work through resistance from supposed mentors, to face rejection from publishers and classmates, and to stand against traditions that silence you?" and "How can writers and teachers even begin to make diversity matter in meaningful ways on the page, in the classroom, and on our bookshelves?"

How Dare We! Write is an inspiring collection of intellectually rigorous lyric essays and innovative writing exercises; it opens up a path for inquiry, reflection, under­standing, and creativity that is ultimately healing. The testimonies provide a hard won context for their innovative paired writing experiments that are, by their very nature, generative.
--Cherise A. Pollard, PhD, Professor of English, West Chester University of Pennsylvania

So-called “creative writing” classes are highly politicized spaces, but no one says so; to acknowledge this obvious fact would be to up-end the aesthetics, cultural politics (ideology) and economics on which most educational institutions are founded. How Dare We! Write, a brilliant interventive anthology of essays, breaks this silence.
-- Maria Damon, Pratt Institute of Art; co-editor of Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader

How Dare We! Write is a collection of brave voices calling out to writers of color everywhere: no matter how lonely, you are not alone; you are one in a sea of change, swimming against the currents.
-- Kao Kalia Yang, author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, and The Song Poet, a 2017 Minnesota Book Award winner

How Dare We! Write is a much needed collection of essays from writers of color that reminds us that our stories need to be told, from addressing academic gatekeepers, embracing our identities, the effects of the oppressors tongue on our psyche and to the personal narratives that help us understand who we are.
---Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria, writer, spoken word poet/performer and contributing author to A Good Time for fhe Truth: Race in Minnesota

Learn more at http://blog.SherryQuanLee.com

Save this product for later

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.