Imagonna: Peace Corps Memories

"Imagonna" takes readers to Africa with a young man in his twenties who is West Virginia's first Peace Corps volunteer. Julian Martin taught chemistry and coached the track team at a secondary school in Nigeria where he was confronted with unexpected racism. You will take a third class train trip with him, be there as he faces into an automatic rifle and as he flees from a man weilding a machete. You will be surprised at who he brings home. The author is the eighth generation of his family born in West Virginia's Big Coal River Valley. He has a chemical engineering degree from West Virginia University and worked two years in the chemical industry. After one month training to make sidewinder missiles, he joined the Peace Corps. Since the Peace Corps Julian Martin worked as Foreign Student Adviser at West Virginia University, taught high school chemistry and physics in the San Francisco Bay area and in West Virginia, directed Urban Outreach for the Charleston, WV, YMCA, and was an organic farmer on his family homeplace. The author is on the board of directors of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, the Kanawha State Forest Foundation, the West Virginia Labor History Association and the West Virginia Environmental Education Association. In retirement, Julian Martin is active in the efforts to stop the destructive practice of mountain top removal strip mining in his beloved Appalachian Mountains.

Julian Martin lives with his wife, Mae Ellen Wilson, in Charleston West Virginia and claims to know who guarded Wilt Chamberlain when he scored one hundred points and why chickens cackle when they lay an egg.