About

Matt Gallagher is the author of the novels Empire City and Youngblood, a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His work has appeared in Esquire, ESPN, The New York Times, The Paris Review and Wired, among other places. He’s also the author of the Iraq war memoir Kaboom and coeditor of, and contributor to, the short fiction collection Fire & Forget: Short Stories from the Long War.

In January 2017, Senator Elizabeth Warren read Matt’s Boston Globe op-ed “Trump Rejects the Muslims Who Helped Us” on the U.S. Senate Floor, and his work in March 2022 helping train a civilian defense force in Lviv, Ukraine, was featured on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360. Among other media, he’s appeared on CBS News Sunday Morning and NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show, and he was interviewed at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan by retired general David H. Petraeus. Matt is the recipient of a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Fellowship, and was recently selected as the 2022 Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum Writer-in-Residence.

A graduate of Wake Forest and Columbia, Matt is a 2021-23 fellow with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, based in Green Country, Oklahoma. He lives with his wife and sons in Tulsa, and works remotely as a writing instructor for New York University’s English Department’s Words After War, a workshop devoted to bringing veterans and civilians together to study conflict literature.