Keynote Speakers
Suzan-Lori Parks
Named among Time magazine’s “100 Innovators for the Next Wave,” Suzan-Lori Parks is
one of the most acclaimed playwrights in American drama today. She is the first
African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and is a
MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient. She’s been awarded grants by the National
Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, New York State
Council on the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also the
recipient of a Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the
Arts, and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. She and is an alum of New Dramatists
and of Mount Holyoke College. Parks’s plays include Topdog/Underdog (2002
Pulitzer Prize winner); The Book of Grace; In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize
finalist); Venus (1996 OBIE Award); The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole
Entire World; Fucking A; Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990
OBIE Award); and The America Play. Her newest plays, Father Comes Home From The
Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3)—set during the Civil War—was awarded the Horton Foote
Prize, the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama as well as being a 2015 Pulitzer
Prize Finalist. Currently performing Watch Me Work, a free weekly writing
workshop, open to artists of all disciplines, Parks teaches at New York
University, and serves at the Public Theater as its Master Writer Chair.
Robert Olen Butler
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs,
Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The
Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot
Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six
volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance,
Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won
the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient
of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American
Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner
Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received
two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in
fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared
widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic
Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia
Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. His works have been
translated into twenty-one languages, and he was a charter recipient of the Tu
Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding
contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Butler is a Francis
Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative
Writing at Florida State University.
WLA Conference Fellows
Brian Castner is a nonfiction writer, former US Air Force Explosive Ordnance Disposal
officer, and veteran of the Iraq War. He is the bestselling author of All the
Ways We Kill and Die, and the war memoir The Long Walk, which was adapted into
an opera and named an Amazon Best Book for 2012.
Maurice Decaul, a former
Marine, is a poet, essayist, and playwright, whose writing has been featured in
the New York Times, The Daily Beast, Sierra Magazine, Epiphany, Callaloo,
Narrative, The Common, and others. He is a graduate of Columbia University and
New York University.
Elyse Fenton is the author of the poetry collections Clamor, winner of the 2010
University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize, and Sweet Insurgent (Saturnalia 2017),
winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize. Her work has been published in The
New York Times, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Pleiades, and Prairie
Schooner, and has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered and PRI's The
World.
Richard Johnson is a field artist and visual journalist. He has helped cover the
war in Afghanistan for The National Post—traveling with Canadian and U.S.
forces, and the war in Iraq for the Detroit Free Press—embedding with the United
States Marine Corps. Many of his fieldwork reportage sketches from Iraq and
Afghanistan are held by the Smithsonian Museum of Armed Forces History, and the
United States Marine Corps Museum.
Martin Löschnigg earned a Ph.D. from Graz University (1993), where he is now Professor of English, Chair of the Section on the New English Literatures and Deputy Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies. His main research interests include narrative theory, autobiography, the English novel, the literature of war, and Canadian Literature.
Meg McLagan is a filmmaker and cultural anthropologist. She co-directed the feature documentary Lioness, which won the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award at Full Frame Documentary Festival, and screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and many other venues including the U.S. Congress. She earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University.
Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and author of The War Works Hard (2005), translated by Elizabeth Winslow. The collection won the PEN Translation Award, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was selected as one of the 25 Best Books of 2005 by the New York Public Library. Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (2009), co-translated with Elizabeth Winslow, won the Arab American Book Award.
Dan O’Brien is is a playwright, poet, and librettist. His play, The Body of an American, is the winner of the Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play and the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama among other awards. O'Brien's third collection of poetry, New Life, was published by CB Editions in London in 2015, and by Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn in 2016. He holds a BA in English & Theatre from Middlebury College and an MFA in Playwriting & Fiction from Brown University.
G. Kurt Piehler is the Director of the Institute of World
War II and the Human Experience and Associate Professor of History at Florida
State University. He is author of Remembering War the American Way (Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1995, reprint ed., 2004) and World War II (Greenwood Press,
2007) in the American Soldiers’ Lives series.
Helen Thorpe’s journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York
magazine, The New Yorker, Slate, and Harper’s Bazaar. Her radio stories have
aired on This American Life and Sound Print. She is the author of Soldier Girls
and The Newcomers.
Special Presenters on 30th Anniversary of WLA
Brian Turner is an American poet, essayist, and professor. He won the 2005 Beatrice
Hawley Award from his debut collection Here, Bullet, a collection of poems about
his experience as a solider in the Iraq War. His honors include a Lannan
Literary Fellowship and NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and the Amy Lowell
Poetry Travelling Scholarship. He earned a MFA in Poetry from the University of
Oregon. Turner is the Director of Sierra Nevada College’s Master of Fine Arts
program.
Benjamin Busch is a veteran US Marine officer, writer, filmmaker, and illustrator. He’s the author of the memoir Dust to Dust (Ecco) and his essays have been published in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, War Literature & the Arts, and on NPR. His poems have appeared in North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review and Epiphany, among many others.
J.A. Moad II is a former Air Force C-130 pilot with over 3,000 flight
hours and more than 100 combat sorties. He served as an English
Professor at the United States Air Force Academy and continues to
serve as an editor and blogger for their international journal, War,
Literature & the Arts (WLA). His short stories, poetry and essays
have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, and he is the
recipient of the Consequence Magazine Fiction Award. In addition
to writing, he has performed on stage at the Library of Congress and
at The Guthrie Theater as part of The Telling Project - Giving Voice
to the Veteran Experience. In the fall of 2017, he performed in his
play, Outside Paducah - the Wars at Home in New York City at the
Wild Project Theater and was nominated for the New York
Innovative Theater Award (NYIT) for Outstanding Solo
Performance. He currently resides in Northfield, MN. He is a
graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, Southern Illinois
University, and Augsburg College.