Deb Olin Unferth
Austin, TX
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the memoir Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection Minor Robberies; and the novel Vacation, winner of the Cabell First Novel Award and New York Times Critics Choice. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Boston Review and elsewhere. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and is an associate professor at Wesleyan University.
Revolution and Natural Citizens
Deb Olin Unferth
Artist BioRevolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War tells the story of Deb Olin Unferth, at eighteen, running away from college with her boyfriend and attempting to join the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. The year is 1987, a turning point in the Cold War. In a comic twist on both the traditional war narrative and the coming-of-age memoir, the couple find themselves unwanted, unhelpful, unprepared and, finally, disillusioned—with the revolution and each other. A follow-up to Revolution, the graphic novel Natural Citizens, deals with similar themes of the youthful search for meaning.