The Spring 2017 issue of The Iowa Review, published on May 4, features the work of the winners and runners up of the magazine’s third biennial veterans’ writing contest. The Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans is The Iowa Review’s creative writing contest for military veterans and active duty personnel. The winning work includes poetry, short fiction, and essay. This year, the contest was judged by Phil Klay, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and author of Redeployment, which won the 2014 National Book Award.
The veterans’ work will be published alongside writing by Margaret Reges, Yunte Huang, Natalie Bakopoulos, Iheoma Nwachukwu, and Hai-Dang Phan.
About the Winners and Runners-up
Winner
Graham Barnhart served as a Special Forces medic in Iraq and Afghanistan and is currently pursuing an MFA at Ohio State University. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Beloit Poetry Journal, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Sewanee Review, and others. He was recently named the recipient of the 2015 Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Journal.
Second Place
Born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks, DF Brown was educated at the University of Missouri and San Francisco State University, where he studied with Bernard Gershenson and the late C.D. Wright. It was his good fortune to be in San Francisco as language poetry blossomed and the cafes were full of poetry readings and talks. Brown served ten years in the U.S. Army as a combat medic in Vietnam with the Fourth Infantry Division, and then hospital duty in Georgia and Germany. Author of Returning fire and The Other Half of Everything, Brown taught high school English for any years in Houston, Texas, and currently gardens vegetables in the heart of that city.
Runners-up
Jason Arment served in Operation Iraqi Freedom as a machine gunner in the U.S. Marine Corps. He earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Gulf Coast, Lunch Ticket, Chautauqua, Hippocampus, Burrow Press Review, Dirty Chai, Phoebe, Pithead Chapel, The Indianola Review, Brevity, The Florida Review, and, War, Literature and the Arts. His work has also been anthologized in Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Volumes 2 and 4, an dis forthcoming in Zone 3 and Duende. University of Hell Press will publish his memoir Musalaheen in 2017. Arment lives in Denver where he coordinates the Denver Veteran Writing Worship with the Colorado Humanities.
Sale Lilly is currently a crisis management consultant with over ten years of experience providing political and business intelligence to senior government, military, and nonprofit clients in the United States, China, and Southwest Asia. Lilly served in the U.S. Navy for eight years and is a recipient of the Bronze Star for his intelligence contributions to NATO combat operations in Afghanistan. He is an alumnus of the U.S. Naval Academy, L’Orientale di Napoli, Middlebury Language School, and Oxford University
Karen Skolfield’s book Frost in the Low Areas (Zone 3 Press) won the 2014 PEN/New England Award in poetry. Her new poems appear in Boulevard, The Carolina Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Slice, and elsewhere. Skolfield is an Army veteran who teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
About The Iowa Review
Based in the Department of English, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, at the University of Iowa, The Iowa Review publishes three print issues per year featuring poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction. Work from its pages is consistently selected to appear in such anthologies as Best American Essays, Best American Short Stories, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories.
More information about The Iowa Review, including how to subscribe, purchase individual issues, or find the current issue in a bookstore, can be found at iowareview.org.