Speaking from varied military backgrounds and literary genres, four celebrated writers will discuss the connection between their experiences as veterans and their creative work.
“Military Service/Literary Solace: A Conversation with Veteran Writers” is presented in partnership with the Center for the Humanities, Missouri Humanities and Missouri Center for the Book and sponsored by the Veterans United Foundation.
When: April 18th, 2024
6 p.m. – Reception
6:30 p.m. – Reading & Conversation
7:30 p.m. – Book Signing
Where: Cook Hall, State Historical Society of Missouri
605 Elm Street
Columbia, MO
Register for Military Service/Literary Solace
Guest authors
Dewaine Farria is the author of the novel Revolutions of All Colors (Syracuse University Press, December 2020). Dewaine’s short stories and essays have appeared in Literary Hub, the New York Times, Rumpus, the Southern Humanities Review, CRAFT, War on the Rocks, Afropunk, and the anthology, Our Best War Stories: Prize-winning Poetry and Prose from the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Award (Middle-West Press, October 2020). He has received fellowships from the National Security Education Program (2004), the MacDowell Colony (2021, 2022), and the National Endowment for the Arts (2022). Besides his stint in the U.S. Marine Corps, Dewaine spent most of his professional life working for the United Nations. He is presently based in the Philippines as the head of the Asian Development Bank’s Field Security Unit with responsibility for 45 field offices across Asia and the Pacific.
Jerri Bell retired from the US Navy after twenty years of service that included sea tours on HMS Sheffield and USS Mount Whitney, and shore assignments in Norfolk, Virginia; Lajes, Azores; Washington, DC; and as Assistant Naval Attaché at the US Embassy in Moscow, Russia. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Fairfield University, a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the Johns Hopkins University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Russian and Soviet Studies from Vassar College. Since 2013, she has served as the Managing Editor for O-Dark-Thirty, the literary journal of the Veterans Writing Project. Her short fiction and nonfiction have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she and former Marine Tracy Crow are the authors of It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan (University of Nebraska Press/Potomac Books, 2017). Her book on the “Golden Fourteen”—the first African American women to serve officially in the US armed forces, is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press/Potomac Books.
Matt Gallagher is a US Army veteran and the author of four books, including the novels Daybreak and Youngblood, a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His work has appeared in Esquire, ESPN, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Wired, among other places. A graduate of Wake Forest and Columbia, he is the recipient of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Fellowship, and was selected as the 2022 Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum Writer-in-Residence. He lives with his family in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Brian Turner is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently: The Wild Delight of Wild Things (2023), The Goodbye World Poem (2023), and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook (2023), all forthcoming with Alice James Books. His other collections include Here, Bullet to Phantom Noise, and the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country. He is the editor of The Kiss and co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres anthologies. A musician, he has also written and recorded several albums with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team, including 11 11 (Me Smiling) and The Retro Legion’s American Undertow. His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, among other fine journals, and he was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which was nominated for an Academy Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he has received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.
The MU Center for the Humanities’ Veterans Humanities Initiative is a multi-part series of engagements that seeks to understand and process the Veteran experience through creative writing, scholarship, and storytelling. Offered in collaboration with MO Humanities, many of the engagements are free and open to the public. To learn more about joining the Veterans Humanities Initiative as a participant, please contact Phong Nguyen at nguyenpv@missouri.edu.