Youngblood (Gallagher) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—1983
• Where—Reno, Nevada, USA
• Education—B.A., Wake Forest University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City


Matt Gallagher is an American author, former U.S. Army captain, and veteran of the Iraq War. He has written on a variety of subjects, mainly contemporary warfare, becoming widely known for his 2010 memoir Kaboom, an account of his platoon's experiences during the Iraq War. His debut novel Youngblood, also set in Iraq, was released in 2016.

Background and education
Gallagher was born in Reno, Nevada, to attorneys Deborah Scott Gallagher and Dennis Gallagher. He and his brother Luke attended Brookfield School and Bishop Manogue High School, where Matt edited the school newspaper and ran cross country and track. He graduated in 2001.

Gallagher went on to Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He joined Army ROTC the week before 9/11, and decided to honor this commitment after the September 11 attacks. While at Wake Forest, Gallagher served as the sports editor of the Old Gold & Black. He graduated in 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree, commissioning into the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant in the Armor Branch.

Military service
Gallagher trained at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he attended and graduated the Armor Officer Basic Course and Army Reconnaissance Course. He was subsequently assigned to the 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. He deployed with this unit in 2007 as a scout platoon leader with 2-14 Cavalry to Saba al-Bor, a sectarian village northwest of Baghdad.

He was promoted to the rank of captain in July 2008, and was then reassigned to 1-27 Infantry, part of the famed 27th Infantry Regiment, where he served as a targeting officer. He and his unit returned to Schofield Barracks in February 2009, and Gallagher left the Army later that year. He earned the Combat Action Badge during his deployment to Iraq.

Kaboom blog
While deployed to Iraq, Gallagher wrote about his front-line experiences there on a military blog—Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal—which ran from November 2007 to June 2008. Using the pseudonym of LT G, Gallagher offered a brash and brutally honest perspective of modern warfare. The blog was widely read by the national media before being shut down by the writer's military chain-of-command after Gallagher wrote a post detailing his rejection of a promotion in an effort to stay with his soldiers.

Books and other writings
After leaving the Army, Gallagher moved to New York City and wrote his war memoir, Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War, which was published in 2010 and garnered significant praise by both New York Times and Wall Street Journal, among others.

In 2016 Gallagher's first novel, Youngblood, was published. Like Kaboom it, too, received wide acclaim in the national media and has been compared to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and other classic war literature.

Gallagher also co-edited, with Roy Scranton, Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (2013), an anthology of literary fiction by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

In addition to his books, Gallagher has also written for a number of magazines and reviews, including The Atlantic, Boston Review, New York Times and Wired.

Other
In 2013 Gallagher attained an M.F.A. from Columbia University. He works at Words After War, a literary nonprofit devoted to bringing veterans and civilians together to study conflict literature—and has appeared on PBS NewsHour in this capacity.

In early 2015, Gallagher was featured in Vanity Fair alongside Elliot Ackerman, Maurice Decaul, Phil Klay, Kevin Powers and Brandon Willitts, as the voices of a new generation of American war literature. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/7/2016.)