Decorated veteran and local writer Brian Castner and Gerald Howard, executive editor and vice-president of Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House, are teaming up for a special presentation of Just Buffalo Literary Center’s STUDIO series. “Navigating the Publishing Waters: A Conversation with Disappointment River Writer & Editor Brian Castner & Gerald Howard” will be an evening that will help demystify how editors guide writers—even experienced writers—through the troubled waters of the writing process as the two reflect on the process of birthing Brian Castner’s latest work of non-fiction, Disappointment River.

The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited—Just Buffalo Literary Center is encouraging people to RSVP by calling 716.832.5400 or emailing info@justbuffalo.org.

Brian Castner is the author of Disappointment River, All the Ways We Kill and Die and the war memoir The Long Walk, which was adapted into an opera and named a New York Times Editor’s Pick and an Amazon Best Book. His journalism and essays have appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, Esquire, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and on National Public Radio. He is the co-editor of The Road Ahead, a collection of short stories featuring veteran writers, and has twice received grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, to cover the Ebola outbreak in Liberia in 2014, and to paddle the 1200 mile Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean in 2016.

Prior to Doubleday, Gerald Howard worked as a book editor at W. W. Norton, Viking Penguin, and New American Library. A partial list of authors that Howard has worked with includes Chuck Palahniuk, Paul Auster, Don Delillo, William Kennedy, Gore Vidal, and David Foster Wallace. His essays and reviews have appeared in Bookforum, n+1, Tin House, Slate, The American Scholar, The New York Times Book Review and other publications. Howard is the author of The Sixties: Art, Politics and Media of Our Most Explosive Decade, and is currently at work on a biography of the editor and critic Malcolm Cowley.