Phil Klay '05 is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His short story collection Redeployment won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics' Circle John Leonard Prize for best debut work in any genre, and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times. His novel Missionaries was named one of the Wall Street Journal's best 10 books of 2020, and listed by former President Barack Obama's as one of the best books of the year. His nonfiction work won the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters in the category of Cultural & Historical Criticism in 2018. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the Brookings Institution's Brookings Essay series. He currently teaches fiction at Fairfield University.

Klay's newest work, Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in Age of Endless, Invisible War, is an astonishing fever graph of the effects of twenty years of war in a brutally divided America. It was released in May of 2022 with Penguin Press.

Watch Literature in a Time of Crisis: A Conversation with Phil Klay, which took place in February 2023.

Conversations Phil had at Dartmouth during his virtual residency in 2020:

American Culture and Military Culture: Phil spoke with Dartmouth President Emeritus and USMC veteran Jim Wright, and both men engaged in a spirited Q&A in front of a live audience.

Marine Memoirs and Civilian Life: Phil spoke with Nate Fick '99, USMC veteran, author of One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, and general manager of Elastic Security.

Accounts of War, Ancient and Modern: Phil spoke with Roberta Stewart, Dartmouth Professor of Classics and creator and teacher of "War Stories: Modern Vets Meet Ancient Texts."

Roundtable Discussion with Phil Klay and Dartmouth Veterans: Panelists were Nathan Bruschi '10 (Navy), Diane Cammarata '21 (National Guard), Brad Carney '20 (Army), Colson Palage '22 (Air Force), and Kate Sullivan '13 (Marines).