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America's long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have defined a generation even as the gap between soldier and civilian widens. What does literature have to say about these complicated conflicts and their legacy? With post-9/11 veteran and novelist Matt Gallagher (and excerpts from veteran and novelist Elliot Ackerman), we will look at how and why war literature matters today.

BRIAN CASTNER is a nonfiction writer, former Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer, and veteran of the Iraq War. He is the bestselling author of All the Ways We Kill and Die, and the war memoir The Long Walk, which was adapted into an opera and named an Amazon Best Book for 2012. He is a contributing writer to VICE, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Foreign Policy, Buzzfeed, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and on National Public Radio. He has twice received grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, to cover the Ebola outbreak in Liberia in 2014, and to paddle the 1200 mile Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean in 2016. His next project, a co-edited collection of short stories, is titled The Road Ahead, and will be published in January.

MATT GALLAGHER is the author of the novel Youngblood, published in February 2016 by Atria/​Simon & Schuster. Reviewing for The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote of Youngblood, "On one level, the novel is a parable - with overtones of Graham Greene's The Quiet American - about the United States and Iraq and the still unfurling consequences of the war ... Mr. Gallagher has a keen reportorial eye, a distinctive voice and an instinctive sympathy for the people he is writing about ... [This] is an urgent and deeply moving novel." A former U.S. Army captain, Matt's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily and Playboy, among other places. He's also the author of the Iraq memoir Kaboom and coeditor of, and contributor to, the short fiction collection Fire & Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. In 2015, Gallagher was featured in Vanity Fair as one of the voices of a new generation of American war literature. A graduate of Wake Forest University, Matt also holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn and works as a writing instructor at Words After War, a literary nonprofit devoted to bringing veterans and civilians together to study conflict literature.

KILEY BENSE is a writer and journalist whose literary nonfiction focuses on the intersections of history, memory, and family. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Departures, and Saveur, among others. She is currently at work on a book about World War II and the lasting consequences of trauma. Kiley holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a master's from the Columbia School of Journalism. Read her work at kileybense.com.