DANBURY, CONN. — U.S. Army veteran and award-winning poet Brian Turner will read from his work at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 3, 2014, in Alumni Hall on the Western Connecticut State University Midtown campus, 181 White St. in Danbury. The reading will be free and open to the public. Turner’s appearance at Western is sponsored by the university’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing program and the School of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Brian Clements, coordinator of Western’s M.F.A. program, said, “Brian Turner is one of the most important writers to come out of military service in the Iraq War. His first book of poems, ‘Here, Bullet,’ in many ways is the Iraq War’s equivalent to the Vietnam War’s ‘The Things They Carried’ by Tim O’Brien. His current memoir, ‘My Life as a Foreign Country,’ is another important document of what it means to experience war and to deal with its aftermath.”

According to Turner’s website, he earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the U.S. Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division in 1999-2000. His poems and memoir are based on his experiences during these deployments.

As a brutally honest retelling of his military service, Turner’s work has been heralded by reviewers. A review in The New Yorker stated, “As a war poet, [Brian Turner] sidesteps the classic distinction between romance and irony, opting instead for the surreal.” The New York Times Book Review wrote, “The day of the first moonwalk, my father’s college literature professor told his class, ‘Someday they’ll send a poet, and we’ll find out what it’s really like.’ Turner has sent back a dispatch from a place arguably more incomprehensible than the moon — the war in Iraq — and deserves our thanks …”

Turner’s work has yielded numerous literary awards. Among them: a 2009 Fellow Award from United States Artists, a 2009 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a 2008 Charity Randall Citation, a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the 2007 Poets’ Prize for “Here, Bullet,” a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, a Northern California Book Award in Poetry, a PEN Center USA “Best in the West” Literary Award in Poetry, a Sheila Margaret Motten Award from the New England Poetry Club, a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a Beatrice Hawley Award.

While many have credited Turner’s poem, “The Hurt Locker,” published in his “Here, Bullet” anthology as the inspiration for the 2009 Academy Award-winning film of the same name, in fact the phrase “hurt locker” dates back to the Vietnam War era and is an expression frequently used in combat. While Turner’s prose did not inspire the film, it has contributed greatly to the public’s understanding of the atrocities of war. A review in The Progressive reveals, “‘Here, Bullet’ conveys the pain, the sadness, the fear, the loneliness of armed conflict with eloquent words and vivid descriptions. In a few words he can conjure up the dramatic aftermath of a bomb in a market place that most newspapers can’t capture in a dozen paragraphs.”

For more information, contact the Office of University Relations at (203) 837-8486.

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