Dewaine Farria

Profile

Dewaine’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Rumpus, The Mantle, CRAFT, and the Southern Humanities Review. Tobias Wolff selected his novel, Revolutions of All Colors, as the winner of Syracuse University’s 2019 Veterans Writing Contest. Syracuse University Press will release the book in the fall of 2020.

Dewaine co-edits The Maine Review’s weekly “Embody” column. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Dewaine also holds an MA in International and Area Studies from the University of Oklahoma, where—as a David L. Boren National Security Education Program Fellow—he studied at the Kyiv Linguistic Institute in Ukraine.

As a US Marine, he served in Jordan and Ukraine. Besides his stint in the military, Dewaine spent most of his professional life working for the United Nations Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS), with assignments in the North Caucasus, Kenya, Somalia, and Occupied Palestine. He was awarded UNDSS’s Bravery Award for his actions during an attack on the UNDP compound in Mogadishu in June 2013. Dewaine is presently a Senior Security and Emergency Services Specialist for the Asian Development Bank with responsibility for the safety and security of the organization’s 44 field offices across Asia and the Pacific, including operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh, and the Mindanao region of the Philippines.

Dewaine lives in Manila with his wife, three children, two cats, and a dog.