David Morris is a former Marine infantry officer. He worked in Iraq from 2004 to 2007 as a reporter for Salon and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His story “The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground” was originally published in VQR and was included in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, The Daily Beast, The Los Angeles Times and elsewhere.
In 2008 Morris was awarded a creative nonfiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as residencies at The MacDowell Colony and the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. A graduate of UC Irvine’s MFA program, in 2009 he won the Staige D. Blackford Award for nonfiction writing from the Virginia Quarterly Review.