Benjamin Busch was born in 1968 in Manhattan and grew up in rural central New York state. He graduated from Vassar College in 1991 with a major in Studio Art and soon thereafter accepted a commission in the United States Marine Corps. He served four years as an active duty infantry officer and then from 1996 until recently in the Selected Marine Reserve. He deployed to Iraq in 2003 as the Commanding Officer of Delta Company, 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion and then again in 2005 with a Civil Affairs unit in Ar Ramadi.

The images in his exhibits of photographs, The Art in War (2003) and Occupation (2005), are from these two deployments. In 2004, he began playing the role of Officer Anthony Colicchio on the HBO series The Wire, and has appeared in the HBO series, Generation Kill in Africa. His first film as a writer/director, Sympathetic Details, was released in February of 2008 along with a new exhibit of photographs, Abstract Matter. His essay "Bearing Arms: A Serious Boy at War" appeared in the February issue of Harper’s.

On the Tuesday before the conference Benjamin Busch will deliver the 4th Annual David L. Jannetta Distinguished Lecture in War, Literature & the Arts at the Air Force Academy.

Dexter Filkins, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, joined the newspaper in 2000. From March 2003 until August 2006, he was a correspondent in the paper’s Baghdad bureau. In 2007 and 2008, Filkins was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. He is the author of The Forever War, published by Alfred A. Knopf. His book was a national bestseller, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named the “Best Book of 2008” by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and USA Today. He currently reports as a correspondent for the Kabul bureau of The New York Times. He has twice been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

Filkins has an M.Phil. in International Relations from Oxford University and a B.A. in government from the University of Florida, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He grew up in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Brian Turner is an American poet and the winner of the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet, (Alice James Books) the first of many awards and honors received for this collection of poems about his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War. His honors since include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship.

He received his MFA from the University of Oregon. Turner is a United States Army veteran, and was an infantry team leader for a year in the Iraq War beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999 and 2000 he was with the 10th Mountain Division, deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Turner has seen his poems published in The Cortland Review, Poetry Daily, Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Georgia Review, Rattle, Virginia Quarterly Review, and ZYZZYVA, and in anthologies including Voices in Wartime: The Anthology (Whit Press, 2005) and Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families (Random House, 2006).

Turner was also presented the 2nd Annual David L. Jannetta Distinguished Lecture in War, Literature, and the Arts at the United States Air Force Academy.

Brian Turner reads "Here, Bullet"

Brian Turner reads "The Hurt Locker"