Outside the Wire: New Veterans Writing

A panel discussion about new literature of war featuring veteran-writers: novelist Matt Gallagher (Youngblood, Kaboom), fiction writer and veterans services professional Mariette Kalinowski (Fire and Forget), and poet Hugh Martin (The Stick Soldiers). Moderated by Peter Molin.

Matt Gallagher is the author of the novel Youngblood, published in February 2016 by Atria/Simon & Schuster. He holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia and has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Paris Review, among others. A former U.S. Army captain, he’s also the author of the Iraq memoir Kaboom, and co-editor of and contributor to the short fiction collection Fire & Forget. Matt lives with his wife in Brooklyn and works as a writing instructor at Words After War, a literary nonprofit devoted to bringing veterans and civilians together to study conflict literature.

Hugh Martin is a veteran of the Iraq War and the author of The Stick Soldiers (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2013) and So, How Was the War? (Kent State UP, 2010). He is the recipient of The Iowa Review Jeff Sharlet Award, the Stanford University Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and the Gettysburg College Emerging Writer Lectureship. His work has appeared The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, and The New Yorker.

Mariette Kalinowski is a combat veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps who served two tours in Operation Iraqi Freedom. She earned both of her degrees from Hunter College in the City University of New York, a BA in Literature and Criticism in 2011, and an MFA in fiction in 2014. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others, and her short story “The Train” can be found in the anthology Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. She is currently working on her first novel about a female Marine Corps combat veteran, for what seems like an ungodly amount of time, and hopes to not have to sell her soul to the devil, in order to finish it.

Chantelle Bateman is a mother, writer, and mixed medium visual artist currently residing in Philadelphia, PA. After returning home from Iraq in 2005 and battling years of undiagnosed post-traumatic stress, she met other veterans who were using art as a tool for healing and direct action. Now, as a creative activist, facilitator, and community organizer she works to support processes of transformative justice and healing. She is a member of the Warrior Writers Steering Committee and on the Steering Committee of FAAN (Fostering Activism and Alternatives Now). Chantelle is also a 2013 Leeway Foundation Art & Change Grant recipient, and her creative works have been published in two Warrior Writers books, After Action Review and Warrior Writers Fourth Anthology, featured in the film, Out of Step, and exhibited at the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago.

Peter Molin (moderator) is a retired US Army officer who currently teaches in the Writing Program at the Rutgers-New Brunswick campus. While in the Army he taught for several years at the United States Military Academy at West Point and in 2008-2009 deployed to Khost, Afghanistan, where he served as an advisor to the Afghan National Army. He has written about his deployment at 15-Month Adventure (petermolin.wordpress.com) and currently blogs at Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature (acolytesofwar.com). He has a BA from the University of Virginia, an MA from the University of California-Berkeley, and a PhD from Indiana University. He is a member of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Association, the New York City Veterans Alliance, and the Military Writers Guild. He is also the Mentor Program Coordinator for the Veterans Writing Project.