UMD News Releases

A fiction writer and UMD English Professor Joseph Maiolo will present two readings on his personal narrative essay "My Turkish Missile Crisis," on October 30 at 7 p.m. and November 3 at 3 p.m. in the UMD Library Rotunda (fourth floor).

In October 1962, Air Force Lieutenant Joseph Maiolo (having been assigned to a six-months' nuclear-weapons maintenance training course two years before) arrived for duty at Cigli Air Base in western Turkey during the first days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was immediately informed that he would be in charge of the nuclear warheads for fifteen Jupiter missiles located three to a site (on five sites) ranging to within 150 miles of the Russian border.

Americans--and the world--listened to the news and read about what seemed to be going on in and around Cuba during those thirteen fearful days. "My Turkish Missile Crisis" (in dramatizing the other story) shows from within the eye of that storm how close we came to global calamity.

Professor Maiolo has published in The Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Texas Review, other magazines, and anthologies. His national awards include a Pushcart Prize, three PEN/Syndicated Fiction Awards (two read on National Public Radio), two National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowships, listing in Best American Short Stories, a Bush Artist Fellowship and a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction in Fiction. An excerpt from a memoir in progress was published in a Beacon Press anthology, Resurrecting Grace. A collection of short stories and a novel are presently being considered for publication.

The events are sponsored by the Royal D. Alworth, Jr. Institute for International Studies and the College of Liberal Arts.