Raymond Carver Reading Series: Dewaine Farria

Dewaine Farria’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Rumpus, The Mantle, CRAFT, and the Southern Humanities Review, and he co-edits The Maine Review’s weekly “Embody” Column. Tobias Wolff selected his novel, Revolutions of All Colors, as the winner of Syracuse University’s 2019 Veterans Writing Contest. Syracuse University Press will release the book in the fall of 2020.

Farria holds an MA in International and Area Studies from the University of Oklahoma, where—as a David L. Boren National Security Education Program Fellow—he studied at the Kyiv Linguistic Institute in Ukraine. He also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

As a U.S. Marine, he served in Jordan and Ukraine. Besides his stint in the military, he has spent most of his professional life working for the United Nations Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS), with assignments in the North Caucasus, Kenya, Somalia, and Occupied Palestine. He was awarded UNDSS’s Bravery Award for his actions during an attack on the UNDP compound in Mogadishu in June 2013. He currently lives in Manila and is a Senior Security and Emergency Services Specialist for the Asian Development Bank.

The Raymond Carver Reading Series features twelve to fourteen prominent writers yearly as part of a large undergraduate class taught by TAs from the Creative Writing Program. The readings have an extended question-and-answer session along with a reading.

Normally these readings take place in Gifford Auditorium on Syracuse University’s main campus and are open to the public, but because of the global-health situation the Fall 2020 Reading Series will be conducted virtually via the videoconferencing platform Zoom. If you are interested in a Zoom invitation to this reading, please contact Sarah Harwell at scharwel@syr.edu.

(Photo by Iryna Farria)

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