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Roy Scranton, “Ambush Your Experience: Using Innovative Literary Techniques in Veterans Writing”

Roy Scranton (Ola Kjelbye)
Roy Scranton (Ola Kjelbye)
Roy Scranton (Ola Kjelbye)

Roy Scranton is the author of I ♥ Oklahoma! (Soho Press, 2019), Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2019), We’re Doomed. Now What? (Soho Press, 2018), War Porn (Soho Press, 2016), and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights, 2015). He has written for the New York TimesRolling StoneThe Nation, the New Republic, The BafflerYale ReviewBoston Review, and elsewhere, and he co-edited What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate & Reinvent Our Future (Unnamed Press, 2017) and Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (Da Capo, 2013). He grew up in a working-class family in Oregon, dropped out of college after his freshman year, and spent his early twenties wandering the American West. In 2002, he enlisted in the US Army and served four years, including a fourteen-month deployment to Iraq.

After leaving the Army at the rank of sergeant, he completed his bachelor’s degree and earned a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research, then earned a PhD in English at Princeton. His essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University, and he has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches creative writing. Website: http://royscranton.com/

Roy Scranton’s lecture is part of Writing Across the Civil-Military Divide, a series of lectures and writing workshops that aim to help veterans’ stories be seen by the American public. Participants, both veterans and civilians, will come together to explore and write literary fiction and memoir related to experiences with the civil-military divide, culminating in a publication of their own writing on the topic. Support for Writing Across the Civil-Military Divide is provided by the Salt Lake City Arts Council.

Writing Across the Civil-Military Divide events include writing workshops and lectures geared towards helping veterans tell their stories in ways that allow for a public conversation about the growing divide between the American public and its veterans. Additional information about Writing Across the Civil-Military Divide events can be found at http://www.slcc.edu/cwc/upcomingevents.aspx

Roy Scranton, “Ambush Your Experience: Using Innovative Literary Techniques in Veterans Writing”

Thursday, February 27, 7 p.m.

SLCC South City Campus, Multipurpose Room, 1575 South State Street

Free and open to the public