Brian Castner, Matthew Hefti

press release:

A Room of One's Own welcomes two veterans and comrades-in-arms, Matthew Hefti and Brian Castner for readings from their new books about the difficulties of war. The will be introduced by David Chrisinger, editor of See Me For Who I Am: Student Veterans' Stories of War and Coming Home, an anthology which features a Foreword and Afterword by Brian and Matthew respectively. Matthew and Brian both served in the small military community of Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technicians. They trained together in 2004 in preparation for their first deployments to Iraq. Now, both of them are published authors, sharing their experiences in different ways--Matthew with fiction and Brian with non-fiction.

About Brian Castner: Brian Castner is a nonfiction writer, former Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer, and veteran of the Iraq War. He is the author of the new book All the Ways We Kill and Die, published in March 2016, and the war memoir The Long Walk, which was adapted into an opera and named an Amazon Best Book for 2012. His writing has appeared at The New York Times, Wired, Outside, The Daily Beast, and on National Public Radio. In 2014, he received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to cover the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, filing stories for Foreign Policy, VICE, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

About Matthew Hefti: Matthew J. Hefti is the author of A Hard and Heavy Thing. He deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan a total of four times as an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technician. While enlisted, he earned a BA in English and an MFA in Fiction. He is now pursuing his JD at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he works for the Wisconsin Innocence Project. He writes and edits at www.Wrath-BearingTree.com. You can follow him on Twitter @TheRealHefti.