Author Matt Gallagher chosen as writer-in-residence for Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum

Author Matt Gallagher, a Tulsa, Okla. native, has been selected as the 2022 writer-in-residence for the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in Piggott. The residency is made possible by an underwriting sponsorship by Piggott State Bank.

Gallagher is a former captain in the U.S. Army who served in Iraq. Much of his writing is war-themed.

The residency will allow Gallagher to live and work in the community of Piggott for a month, sharing his knowledge and experience with local writers and working on his own writings. A detailed schedule of the residency will be available later in the year.

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 co-editor of and contributor to the short fiction collection Fire & Forget: Short Stories from the Long War.

In January 2017, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., read Gallagher’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.

A graduate of Wake Forest and Columbia, Gallagher is a 2021-23 fellow with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, based in Green Country, Okla. 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.

The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center is an Arkansas State University Heritage Site in Piggott.