Texas Poet-Veteran D.A. Gray’s “A.M. Radio” Named Finalist Poem

Texas poet and U.S. Army veteran D.A. Gray has been named one of three finalists in the inaugural War Poetry Postcard Project (WPPP), a literary arts experiment to promote empathy and conversation on the effects of war and violence. It is co-sponsored by Middle West Press LLC and Collateral Journal.

Gray is the author of the poetry collections Overwatch (Grey Sparrow Press) and Contested Terrain (FutureCycle Press). He earned his Master of Fine Arts at the Sewanee School of Letters. A retired U.S. Army soldier, Gray now teaches and writes in Central Texas.

The War Poetry Postcrard Project encouraged short poems engaging themes relevant to armed conflict, state violence, and military service. Finalist D.A. Gray’s winning poem, “A.M. radio,” depicts an emotionally harrowing road trip of two wartime colleagues punctuated by bursts of radio talk-show static. The poem reads, in part:

[...] A man’s voice speaks of those people, then the signal,
The caller wants those people to go back.
You begin to picture faces: the translator who risked
everything feeding you dolma and tea so sweet
sugar settled in the glass; your soldier, who volunteers
every job by day, studies for his citizenship test by night. [...]

The poem will published and distributed as a visually engaging glossy 4x6 postcard, suitable for mailing to friends, family, politicians, and others.

Everyone who entered the contest will be mailed a set of the finalist postcards. (Additional sets of the 2025 finalist postcards can be ordered via Submittable here at this link.)

Gray writes that he hopes the poem helps cut through a news atmosphere of perpetual rage and fear. 

“[I]f there are things I hope this poem conveys, they are: that we [veterans] are not a monolithic group, that most of us see the human beings we serve with rather than ideology, that we serve for specific tangible things such as being in chosen families whose members come from all over. And our concerns and our anger over what is happening is born out of our love of the people and places where we live. These families are often messy and take work, just like the poems we read and write about them.”

Poetry, Gray writes, offers opportunities to speak truth, to witness, but also to offer imagination and humanity.

“We are in a time when many would like to silence dissent. [...] The Defense Department attempts to minimize, if not erase, the accomplishments of many Black, Hispanic, and women veterans is an example of this control. Poets and artists have the ability to describe what we’ve seen when it goes against the narrative, to preserve stories some would like to forget, and to offer a moral imagination for the future. This does not just include our traumas, but [also] our funny stories, our love stories, and the full range of being human—lest we forget.”

Established in 2016 by Abby E. Murray, Collateral Journal is a twice-annual on-line journal that features “literary and visual art concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone.”

Incorporated as an independent micro-publisher in 2015 by freelance editor and writer Randy “Sherpa” Brown, Middle West Press LLC annually produces from 1 to 4 projects of non-fiction, journalism, fiction, and poetry. Middle West Press’ literary projects often celebrate the people, places, and history of the American Midwest, as well as U.S. military veterans and families.

For more information about the War Poetry Postcard Project, including social media links, visit: linktr.ee/warpoets