Novels of War

Elliot Ackerman served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and is the recipient of the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. A former White House Fellow, his essays and fiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and Ecotone, among others. His debut novel, Green on Blue (Scribner), is a stirring story of a young Afghan orphan and the harrowing, intractable nature of war. Michiko Kakutan, writing for the New York Times, declares Green on Blue is a novel that conveys, with harrowing power, the fallout that decades of war . . . has had on that country’s people, and at the same time, it’s a kind of Greek tragedy about the cycles of revenge and violence that can consume families and tribes, generation after generation.”

Ron Childress started his work life in boatyards up and down the New England coast, but at nineteen, he enrolled in community college and went on to earn his BA, MA, and PhD in literature. Childress worked for several years as a communications manager for a professional association near Washington, D.C., before joining his wife in her tech marketing agency. In 2000, he left the business to pursue fiction writing full time. Winner of the prestigious PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, his first novel, And West Is West (Algonquin Books) is an inspired novel about the devastating power of new technology to corrupt innocent lives.

Skip Horack is a former Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where he was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His story collection The Southern Cross won the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Fiction Prize, and his novel The Eden Hunter was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Haunted by the disappearance of his older brother in the first Gulf War, the tragic deaths of his parents, and the felony conviction that has branded him for a decade, the central character in Horack’s second and latest novel, The Other Joseph (Ecco), embarks on a journey across America.