Veterans Day Reading

We're happy to get out the word about The Veterans Writing Project's Veterans Day Reading on Monday, November 12 from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m.  It takes place at The United States Navy Memorial, in The Presidents Room, 701 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.  The program is free, open to the public, and extremely Metro accessible, at the Archives Metro station on the Green Line.   For more information on The Veterans Writing Project visit their Web site, VeteransWriting.org, or see their Facebook page. 

Readers are:

Dario DiBattista is an Iraq war combat veteran and outstanding graduate of the M.A. in Creative Writing Program at The Johns Hopkins University. His work has appeared in The Washingtonian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Connecticut Review, Three Quarter Review, World Hum, and he’s been featured in The New York Times, Urbanite Magazine, and on The Marc Steiner Radio Show. He blogs for many websites, most notably, www.notalone.com, which is a resource website for returning veterans. And he teaches writing at The George Washington University and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center at Bethesda for The Veterans Writing Project, and as an adjunct professor at the Community College of Baltimore County.

Frederick Foote is retired from the U.S. Navy. His 29 years of service, as a Corpsman and physician, included 6 years at sea and deployments to Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm and OIF/OEF. Fred’s poems have appeared in Commonweal, The Progressive, and many other journals. He is the Director of the Warrior Poetry Project at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda.

Kate Hoit is known throughout the military blogosphere as “GI Kate.” Born and raised in Albany, New York, she joined the U.S. Army Reserve at 17 and served for eight years—including time as an Army photojournalist in Balad, Iraq from 2004 – 2005 with the 301st Area Support Group out of Queens. In addition to maintaining the blog GIKate.com, her work has appeared in the New York Times (at The Caucus: The Politics and Government Blog of The Times), Time’s Battleland, The Huffington Post, and VetVoice. She has appeared in the History Channel documentary special Band of Bloggers and has worked on a documentary film about women in the military. Kate currently studies Nonfiction Writing at Johns Hopkins University, and she is a Pat Tillman Military Scholar.

James Mathews is the author of Last Known Position, a short story collection published by the University of North Texas Press and winner of the 2008 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. He is also a Chief Master Sergeant in the District of Columbia Air National Guard with over 25 years of military service. Since 9/11, he has been activated and deployed numerous times including two tours in Iraq, in 2003 and 2006.

Grady Smith attended Infantry Officer Candidate School and Ranger and Airborne training at Fort Benning. He commanded an infantry company in the Vietnam Delta and served in the Army for 20 years. His final assignment was Executive Office of the U.S. Army Center of Military History. He is a produced playwright, and his novel about combat trauma, Blood Chit, was published in August.