Local Author Receives Gold from Military Writers Society

Each year, the Military Writers Society of America recognizes noteworthy authors and their works nationwide, and this year, local author Annette Langlois Grunseth earned a gold medal in the Memoir/Biography category for her book Combat and Campus: Writing through War.

The work combines correspondence from Grunseth’s older brother, Sgt. Peter Langlois, during the Vietnam War with Grunseth’s poetry. Langlois was a journalist and soldier with the 25th Infantry Division who rode armored personnel carriers into rice paddies, engaged in night time sweeps of the jungle and chronicled the smells, sights and sounds of some of the war’s darkest days during 1968 and 1969.

He returned home to a nation still protesting the war, which Grunseth – as a student at UW-Madison – had witnessed as National Guardsmen marched on the campus. Their correspondence and her poetry present a unique, personal perspective of the war in Vietnam and the social change at home. 

Grunseth is a member of the Belles Lettres critique group, the Door County Poets Collective and the Door County Published Authors Collective.

Combat and Campus is available at Novel Bay Books and OtherWorlds Books and More in Sturgeon Bay and at annettegrunseth.com.