Skip to main content

Bunting Peace and Justice Speaker Series to explore conflict, love, and resilience through storytelling and verse

Black and white photo of Brian Turner reading from a book on a lectern. He is speaking into a microphone.

Loyola University Maryland's Bunting Peace and Justice Speaker Series will host Brian Turner, award-winning poet and memoirist, on Tuesday, Oct. 24, at 6 p.m. in the 4th Floor Program Room of the Andrew White Student Center on Loyola’s campus at 4501 N. Charles Street in Baltimore. The event is free and open to the public. Registration on the Bridge is encouraged. 

Turner’s talk, titled “Singing into the Wound: An Evening of Poetry & Conversation with Brian Turner,” will explore issues of conflict, love, and resilience through storytelling and verse.

Turner is the author of five collections of poetry, including Here, Bullet, a first-person account of his experience as a soldier during the Iraq War, for which he received the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award. His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, and Harper’s Magazine, among other fine journals, and he was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which was nominated for an Academy Award. 

A Guggenheim Fellow, Turner has received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.

“The Bunting speaker series explores the causes and consequences of violent conflict, as well as the conditions that promote conflict resolution, peace, and justice. It aims to promote awareness about peace and justice issues in both our local and global contexts, challenges us to think about complex problems, and encourages us to become more engaged in the world around us,” said Heidi Shaker, director of the Office of Peace and Justice and associate professor of French. “This series is named after Mary Catherine Bunting, whose very generous donation to Loyola has supported the creation of the Peace and Justice minor on campus, as well as numerous faculty and student research grants, course development grants, and community projects.”