Two Acclaimed Literary Journalists Added to Conference Presenters

The River Teeth Nonfiction Conference rounded out its list of writers presenting in May at Ashland University with the addition of literary journalists Earl Swift and Brian Mockenhaupt.  Swift and Mockenhaupt join fifteen other writers who will present over the course of a weekend.  The conference will take place May 17-19, 2013.  For information on how to register, visit the conference registration page.

Brian Mockenhaupt is the author of The Living and the Dead: War, Friendship and the Battles that Never End. He is a contributing editor at Reader’s Digest and Esquire and is the nonfiction editor at the Journal of Military Experience. He writes regularly for The Atlantic and Outside. His work has also appeared in Pacific Standard, Backpacker, The New York Times Magazine, and Chicago. He served two tours in Iraq as an infantryman with the 10th Mountain Division. Since leaving the U.S. Army in 2005, he has written extensively on military and veteran affairs, reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq, hometowns, and hospitals. http://brianmockenhaupt.com/

Earl Swift has written for a living since his teens. Now 53, the Virginia-based journalist has been a Fulbright fellow, PEN finalist and five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, and has earned a reputation for powerful narrative and scrupulous reporting.   

Swift wrote for newspapers in St. Louis, Anchorage and, for twenty-two years, in Norfolk, where his long-form features won numerous state and national awards. His stories have also appeared in PARADE, Popular Mechanics, Best Newspaper Writing and River Teeth.   

He is the author of Journey on the James: Three Weeks Through the Heart of Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 2001), the story of a great American river and the largely untold history that has unfolded in and around it; Where They Lay: Searching for America’s Lost Soldiers (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), for which he accompanied an Army archaeological team into the jungles of Laos in search of a helicopter crew shot down thirty years before; and a 2007 collection of his stories,The Tangierman’s Lament. His new history of the interstate highway system, The Big Roads, was released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on June 9.   

An avid outdoorsman, Swift has through-hiked the Appalachian Trail, circumnavigated the Chesapeake Bay by sea kayak, and traveled the 435-mile length of the James River by canoe.