Background
Celebrating Service: 2023 Veterans’ Voices Anthology is an anthology of stories, essays, and poems by participants in Literary Cleveland’s Veterans’ Voices program.
From October 2022-May 2023, Northeast Ohio military service members and veterans gathered in free creative writing workshops to reflect on their experiences, express their creativity, and share their stories. This collection is a celebration of the talent, hard work, and dedication of the anthology’s contributors and recognition of their unique experiences serving in all branches of the US Military.
Veterans' Voices is presented in partnership with the VA Northeast Ohio Healthcare System and with funding from the Char and Chuck Fowler Family Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Forces Community Engagement program as part of the Mid America Arts Alliance. It is one of Literary Cleveland’s Amplify Projects, designed to empower, uplift, and celebrate our many stories of our region.
Read the anthology online below, or purchase you print copy here.
Introduction
The Veterans' Voices initiative is a series of writing workshops designed to encourage veterans as a community to explore, write, and share their individual stories of military service.
From October 2022 to May 2023, Literary Cleveland, in partnership with the VA Northeast Ohio Healthcare System, held the first year of Veterans' Voices workshops, in which a dedicated group of veterans learned ways to apply poetry and memoir writing to our own military experiences in an effort to creatively express ourselves as veterans. The workshops are an effort to support and celebrate military service through the literary arts.
To become familiar with the War Narrative as a literary genre and gain inspiration for their own writing, we reviewed the work of a number of notable American poets and writers who were also veterans, from Walt Whitman's Civil War poem "Drum Taps" to Phil Klay's collection of short stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Redeployment. These models served as our guiding posts for form, tone, and texture, as well as how to tell war stories in the most effective ways.
The best way for veterans to celebrate our service, as well as our voices, is to tell our stories. Celebrating Service, Veterans' Voices first anthology, serves as a conduit to amplify our voices and our stories. The poems, stories, and essays published herein were written with a sense of duty and creativity in a space that centered on trust, expression, and honor. We hope this anthology expands your understanding of military service by introducing you to the unique and talented veterans of our region.
— Veterans’ Voices Project Leader Mansa L. Bey