Author Phil Klay to Speak at Ramapo College Jan. 29

Press release:

Phil Klay, author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, Redeployment, will speak at Ramapo College on Thursday, Jan. 29, at 1 p.m. in the York Room on campus. Klay will discuss his recent work and the writing process and will give a public reading at 6 p.m in the Trustees Pavilion.

Redeployment was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize and won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014. Klay was also named a National Book Foundation ’5 Under 35′ honoree in 2014 and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Granta, and Tin House, among other publications.

Klay’s visit is sponsored by the Salameno School of Humanities and Global Studies. The events are free and open to the public.

A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Klay served in Iraq’s Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a public affairs officer. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College. While in college, he went to officer candidate school and after being discharged from military service, he attended Hunter College and received a master of fine arts. He also attended New York University’s Veterans Writing Workshop.

Redeployment takes readers to the front lines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking readers to understand what happened there and what happened to the soldiers who returned. It has received numerous accolades. The New York Times described it as “the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls.” The New Yorker called it “the best literary work thus far written by a veteran of America’s recent wars…a masterly collection of short stories about war and its psychological consequences.”