Norwich hosts award winning author on issues facing women in combat

For Immediate Release
April 14, 2011

Contact: Daphne Larkin
802-485-2886 or 595-3613(m)
dlarkin@norwich.edu

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ADVISORY

NORTHFIELD, Vt. – Norwich University will host award winning author Helen Benedict for a presentation on her book The Lonely Soldier: Women at War and Home Again followed by a Q&A on Monday, April 25 from 5 – 6:30 p.m. in Dole Auditorium.

Benedict is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of six novels and five books of nonfiction. Her latest novel, Sand Queen, the story of a female American soldier and an Iraqi woman in the Iraq War, will be published by Soho Press in August, 2011.

Benedict has written a play and many books and articles about sexual assault within the military and without. Her 2010 book, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, received the Exceptional Merit in Media Award from the National Women's Political Caucus and the Ken Book Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness, both in 2010. Her play on female soldiers, The Lonely Soldier Monologues, was produced in New York City in 2009 and 2010 and is currently being performed on several campuses throughout the country.

Benedict has published numerous articles on the subject of women soldiers for the New York Times, Salon, Ms., In These Times and elsewhere. In 2008, she won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for this work.

She has testified twice before Congress on this subject, and continues to lecture at campuses and military academies about gender justice within the military. Her book inspired the current class action suit against the Pentagon on women and men who have been sexually assaulted in the military while serving.

Her articles have also appeared in the Washington Post, the Women’s
Review of Books, The Nation magazine, the BBC and NPR. Her work has been widely anthologized, as well as translated and published in Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Germany, Portugal and is forthcoming in Holland.

This event – sponsored by the Schools of Humanities, Mathematics & Sciences and Social Sciences – is free and open to the public.

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Norwich University is a diversified academic institution that educates traditional-age students and adults in a Corps of Cadets and as civilians. Norwich offers a broad selection of traditional and distance-learning programs culminating in Baccalaureate and Graduate Degrees. Norwich University was founded in 1819 by Captain Alden Partridge of the U.S. Army. Norwich University is the oldest private military college in the United States of America and the birthplace of our nation's Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). www.norwich.edu