Featured speakers include authors Evelyn Sweet-Hurd at the Goldstein Center and Melissa Seligman via video link from Manhattan, Kan.

Sweet-Hurd wrote, His Name Was Donn: My Brother’s Letters from Vietnam, to work through her grief over her brother’s death in the Vietnam War nearly 40 years ago. The author was the featured speaker at a recent teach-in at the Savannah College of Art and Design titled, “Stories.”

Seligman wrote, The Day After He Left for Iraq: A Story of Love, Family, & Reunion, about the attempt to maintain a loving relationship with her husband who was deployed three times in five years. The couple discovered that in the midst of war and separation how pen and paper letters in this era of technological communication contributed to strengthening her marriage. The New York Times recently published an Op-Ed article titled, “One Husband, Two Kids, Three Deployments.

The War letters event also will serves as the culminating event for The Big Read featuring Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Dr. Elaine Whitaker, Chairperson, GCSU Department of English and Rhetoric and Christina Begemann, Senior English and Rhetoric Major, will offer thanks to all The Big Read participants and speak to several common themes in the Bradbury, Sweet-Hurd, and Seligman books.

The event is co-sponsored by Georgia College & State University American Democracy Project and Department of English and Rhetoric, Georgia Military College English Department, and the Georgia National Guard 48th Brigade and 148th Brigade Support Battalion.

For more information contact Gregg Kaufman, GCSU Government & Sociology Department, at (478) 445- 1711.