Elliot Ackerman

At the age of nine, his family moved to London.[1] The family moved back to Washington, DC, when he was fifteen.[1]

Ackerman studied literature and history at Tufts University, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2003, completing a special program in which he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in five years, rather than the usual six.[2] He holds a master's degree in International Affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He also completed many of the United States military’s most challenging special operations training courses.

Beginning in 2003,[3] Ackerman served eight years in the U.S. Marine Corps, working as both an infantry and special operations officer. He served multiple tours of duty in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. As a Marine Corps Special Operations Team Leader, he was the primary combat advisor to a 700-man Afghan commando battalion responsible for capture operations against senior Taliban leadership. He also led a 75-man platoon that aided in relief operations in post-Katrina New Orleans. He was briefly attached to the Ground Branch of the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division.[4]

Ackerman served as Chief Operating Officer of Americans Elect, a political organization known primarily for its efforts to stage a national online primary for the 2012 US Presidential Election. As one of its officers, Ackerman was interviewed extensively, notably on NPR's Talk of the Nation.[5]

Ackerman has served on the board of the Afghan Scholars Initiative and as an advisor to the No Greater Sacrifice scholarship fund.[6] He is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2012 to 2013, Ackerman served as a White House Fellow in the Obama Administration.[6]

Now a novelist and journalist, Ackerman has published four books and his fiction and essays have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Ecotone and others. He is also a contributor to The Daily Beast. In 2017, Ackerman contributed the short story "Two Grenades" to the anthology "The Road Ahead."[7]

Ackerman's first novel, Green on Blue, was published February 17, 2015 by Scribner. Tom Bissell of the New York Times Book Review said,

"Like all novels written in skilled, unadorned prose about men and women of action, this novel will probably be compared to Hemingway’s work. In this case, however, the comparison seems unusually apt…Elliot Ackerman has done something brave as a writer and even braver as a soldier: He has touched, for real, the culture and soul of his enemy.”[8]

The Los Angeles Review of Books describes the novel as a "radical departure from veterans writing thus far" due to his choice of a first-person narrator, the lowly Aziz, a poor soldier in a local militia.[9] The Stars and Stripes review described Green on Blue and Phil Klay's Redeployment as carrying "the sting of authenticity and the sensory expression of experiences lived".[10] Green on Blue was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

Ackerman's second novel Dark at the Crossing, was published January 24, 2017 by Alfred A. Knopf was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2017. In a starred review Library Journal wrote, "Here is a thriller, psychological fiction, political intrigue, and even a love story all wrapped into a stunningly realistic and sometimes horrifying package. Put Ackerman on the A-list."[11] In the New York Times Book Review the novelist Lawrence Osborne wrote, "One could argue that the most vital literary terrain in America’s overseas wars is now occupied not by journalists but by novelists...Elliot Ackerman is certainly one of those novelists...He has created people who are not the equivalents of the locally exotic subjects in your average NPR story, and he has used them to populate a fascinating and topical novel."[12] Dark at the Crossing was noted as one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, NPR, Christian Science Monitor, Military Times, Vogue, and Bloomberg and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Ackerman was a featured author at the Miami Book Fair in 2017.[13]

Ackerman’s third novel Waiting for Eden was published September 25, 2018, by Alfred A. Knopf. The book was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and it won the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation’s James Webb Award. Author Anthony Swofford wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “Masterly…Brilliant…In his short novel, Ackerman accomplishes what a mountain of maximalist books have rarely delivered over tens of thousands of pages and a few decades: He makes pure character-based literary art, dedicated only to deeply human storytelling…Cusk’s Outline trilogy and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation have created similarly shimmering portraits of humans at rest and fury…Ackerman explore[s] conflicted, confused true love in such elegant and humane ways that you will come to question everything you think you know about the meanings of romance and fidelity…The micro-level power of his unadorned and direct prose lies in no less than an attempt to contain and dramatize the darkness and light of our souls…To identify this book as a novel seems inadequate: Waiting for Eden is a sculpture chiseled from the rarest slab of life experience.”[14] The novel was one of the best books of the year on Amazon, NPR, and the Washington Post and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

Ackerman’s fourth book Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning was published June 11, 2019 by Penguin Press. The memoir was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-fiction. TIME magazine named it a must-read book of 2019 and said, “In Places and Names, perhaps the most striking war memoir of the year, Ackerman attempts to make sense of the reasons he served (personal and geopolitical), the people he met, the kinship he felt and the reckonings he has since confronted. Places and Names is as clean and spare in its prose as it is sharp and unsparing in timely observation.”[15] It was also a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

Ackerman’s article “Why Bringing Back the Draft Could Stop America’s Forever Wars” was featured on the cover of the October 21, 2019 issue of TIME magazine.[16]

Ackerman has been interviewed in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and appeared on Charlie Rose, The Colbert Report, NPR's Talk of the Nation, Meet the Press, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Al Jazeera and PBS NewsHour among others.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Elliot Ackerman.

• Elliot Ackerman's appearance on the Colbert Report
• Author website
• Green on Blue at Amazon
• Ackerman at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library
• Appearances on C-SPAN