Outside the Wire: Writing Grief — Public Panel

The Writers House at Rutgers University-Camden will host an in-person panel for veterans, family members, and the public highlighting the narratives and experiences of American veterans throughout the country’s history of conflict. The event is supported by an NJCH grant.

ABOUT THE PANEL

Outside the Wire is a multi-format humanities project that highlights the narratives and experiences of American veterans throughout the country’s history of conflict. This year’s panel—featuring veterans, writers, and scholars whose work intersects with issues of concern to veterans and service members—will explore the diverse ways veterans, active duty service members, and their families have responded to and been impacted by grief. How have veterans written about grief throughout history? How has the pandemic shifted the ways veterans write or discuss grief? What does it mean to write about one’s grief or trauma with an audience in mind? In this panel, we’ll be discussing the ways grief appears in and shapes each panelist’s work. From the violence of the battlefield, to the aftermath of war, to the outcome disparities of the G.I. Bill, to grieving the person one used to be before their service, the patterns of individualized and structural loss and grief in the armed forces have sometimes echoed and sometimes diverged from the conversation about grief in American society as a whole.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Charlotte Kiechel is a historian of modern Europe and decolonization. She is a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2024-2025) and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Williams College. Kiechel is currently finishing her first book, Genocide’s Shadow: Holocaust Memory at the End of Empire. Her research has appeared in Humanity, Journal of Genocide Research, and the Journal of the History of International Law. She received her PhD in history from Yale University.

Dr. Juanita Kirton is published in several anthologies, including AVOW (American Veteran Association for Women Magazine), A Journal of Hope and Healing, Caribbean Writer, Chester H. Jones Literary Journal, Narrative, Veterans Voices, and elsewhere. Juanita’s poetry manuscript, Letters to my Father, was accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press, 2020, and her work can also be found in Inner Journey. Her poem Fall Skates won second prize in the Dream Quest One Writing Contest, 2020. She is the recipient of the Baker Veterans Writing Scholarship, 2018 to attend the Longleaf Writers Conference in Seaside Florida. She won the Sisters in Script self-publishing grant, 1999 and her Peace Haiku was selected for Peace Mural in Philadelphia. Juanita is a member of Women Who Write, Inc., International Women’s Writing Guild and Women Reading Aloud workshop series. She served on editorial staff for Clockhouse Literary Journal and as a teaching artist with Crossing Point Arts (Arts for survivors of human trafficking). Dr. Kirton served fourteen years in the U.S. Army and enjoys touring the US on her motorcycle. She lives in North East PA with her spouse.

Adam Straus is a Marine veteran. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, HAD, Best Small Fictions 2024, and elsewhere. Adam holds an MFA from Rutgers-Camden.

Julie Zavage completed a Master of Social Work degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. Since then, Julie has been providing individual, group, and family psychotherapy to adults and adolescents with many types of mood and substance use disorders. Before graduate school, Julie worked in a VA medical center with veterans with PTSD and other mental health challenges, and served for 5 years in the U.S. Army.

This panel will be held in-person in the Rutgers-Camden Campus Center, South ABC Conference Room. The location is accessible via an elevator. The event is free, and tickets can be reserved via Eventbrite.