Watch the recording of this event:
CROSSCURRENTS ANCHORAGE: BRIAN CASTNER
Moderated by Matt Komatsu
Recorded: Saturday April 16, 2022
7 PM-8:30 PM
The Anchorage Museum, 625 C Street
Anchorage, Alaska
Brian Castner is a nonfiction writer, former Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer, and veteran of the Iraq War. His most recent book is Stampede, a new history of the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush. He is also the bestselling author of Disappointment River, All the Ways We Kill and Die, and the war memoir The Long Walk, which was adapted into an opera and named a New York Times Editor’s Pick and Amazon Best Book of the Year. His journalism and essays have appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, Esquire, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and on National Public Radio. He is the co-editor of The Road Ahead, a collection of short stories featuring veteran writers, and 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. In March 2018 he joined Amnesty International as a Senior Crisis Advisor.
Matt Komatsu is a writer and currently-serving veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who received an MFA from the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Creative Writing (Nonfiction) Program. He coordinated the five prior Danger Close events between 2016-2020 and has strong ties to both current military members and veterans in Alaska. He currently serves as nonfiction editor for the journal War, Literature and the Arts and his work has been widely featured nationally in such publications as the New York Times and Esquire. Both his military and writing careers have given him a strong commitment to the mission of the humanities: to engage, connect and inform.
Since 2016, Danger Close: Alaska has brought together military service members and civilians to read, write, and connect over themes that touch all our lives.