Evelyn Kohl LaTorre

Evelyn Kohl LaTorre is a memoirist, educator, and former Peace Corps volunteer whose writing links travel with cultural learning and personal change. Between Inca Walls, A Peace Corps Memoir follows her arrival in Peru in the 1960s, when she was twenty-one and assigned to community development in an Andean town. She Writes Press published the 328-page memoir in August 2020, with distribution by Simon & Schuster. LaTorre writes from the perspective of later experience while preserving the uncertainty of a young volunteer learning Spanish, finding useful work, and questioning the religious expectations of her Montana upbringing. Photographs and closely observed local encounters give the narrative a documentary layer, while her relationship with Antonio becomes part of a broader account of cross-cultural commitment. The book received the 2021 Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award. LaTorre continued the personal history in Love in Any Language, about marriage and bicultural family life. Her first memoir is therefore both a volunteer chronicle and the opening part of a longer life story.