Upcoming Program: Monday, February 10, 2024

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Livestream link coming soon

Citizenship in an Age of Perpetual Conflict

Phil Klay, Marine Corps Veteran & Author

Though the war in Afghanistan ended in failure and the war in Iraq wound down to a small troop presence, America remains enmeshed in military conflicts around the world. From Africa to the Middle East, we have troops directly in harm’s way, while in countries like Ukraine and Israel we provide support of various kinds, from munitions to critical intelligence.  How should we think about our role as citizens of a country so deeply involved in warfare, and how might literature help us better understand the stakes of the killing done in our name?  A book signing will follow the presentation. Books will be available for purchase at the college bookstore.

The program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Mellon Higher Education Grant “Beyond the New Normal” and by the Middle East Studies Program, the departments of women’s gender & sexuality studies, English and military science, and the Women’s & Gender Resource Center.  This program is part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series and it’s annual theme, Alternative Models.

Biography (provided by Penguin Random House)

Phil Klay is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He served in Iraq’s Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a public affairs officer. After being discharged, Klay received his MFA from Hunter College. He is the author of Redeployment (The Penguin Press), a powerful collection of short stories that takes readers to the front lines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his book and public lectures, Klay explores the complex feelings of brutality, faith, guilt, and fear that a soldier experiences during war, while also revealing the isolation and despair that can accompany a soldier’s homecoming.

With his stark, realistic depictions of war, Phil Klay’s book has been praised as “one of the best debuts of the year” by the Portland Oregonian and author Karen Russell calls his writing “searing and powerful, unsparing of its characters and its readers.”  Redeployment won the the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2015 Chautauqua Prize. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Granta, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, the New York Daily News, Tin House, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012.

Phil Klay’s next work, Missionaries, is a novel of extraordinary suspense infused with geopolitical sophistication and storytelling instincts that are second to none.  Missionaries is a window not only into modern war, but into the individual lives that go on long after the drones have left the skies. Missionaries was included on Barack Obama’s “Favorite Books of the Year” list and hailed as “A sweeping, interconnected novel of ideas in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Norman Mailer” by the Wall Street Journal. Klay’s next book, Uncertain Ground is a powerful series of reckonings with some of our country’s thorniest concerns, written in essay form over the past ten years.

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