Dewaine Farria

Dewaine Farria is the author of the novel Revolutions of All Colors (Syracuse University Press, 2020). His short stories and essays have appeared in Literary Hub, The New York Times, The Rumpus, Southern Humanities Review, CRAFT, War on the Rocks, Consequence, and the anthology, Our Best War Stories: Prize-Winning Poetry and Prose from the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Award (Middle West Press, 2020).

He has received fellowships from the National Security Education Program (2004), MacDowell (2021, 2022), and the National Endowment for the Arts (2022). A former U.S. Marine, Farria spent much of his professional life with the United Nations, with assignments in the North Caucasus, Kenya, Somalia, and Occupied Palestine. In recognition of his actions during an attack on a UN compound in Mogadishu in June 2013, he received the United Nations Bravery Award.  He holds a BS from the University of the State of New York-Albany, an MA in International and Area Studies from the University of Oklahoma, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is working on a novel.

PRAISE FOR REVOLUTIONS OF ALL COLORS

A wonderfully kaleidoscopic portrait emerges of Black masculinity. . . . This grips the reader from start to finish. ― Publishers Weekly

Revolutions of All Colors masterfully conveys, in just 200 pages, the heaviness of lives constantly under examination because of race and sexuality, and their love for their country, each other, and themselves. ― Book Riot

Farria writes with vibrant, breathtaking elegance, unabashed to imbue even bleak corners of the world with shades of humor and simmering sexuality. ― Shelf Awareness

Revolutions of All Colors is a vivid, original novel of young men struggling with questions of race, injustice, personal and political violence; of responsibility to family, friends, lovers, sexual identity—of what it means to be a man. . . . It is a remarkable achievement. ― Tobias Wolff

There’s such ambition and such range in Farria’s superb Revolutions of All Colors, which traces the American relationship to war and policing and race and violence and masculinity across forty years within one fascinating family. With vibrant characters and masterful evocations of everything from the work of contractors in 2000s Somalia to that of Black Panthers in 1970s New Orleans, this is a compulsively readable novel and a wonderful meditation on the complexities of American identity. ― Phil Klay, author of Redeployment, winner of the National Book Award

Gabriel Mathis, a twenty-three-year-old aspiring fantasy writer and reluctant Russophile, travels to Ukraine to teach English and meets the love of his life: an international arms dealer very much out of his league. Simon—a former Special Forces medic, torn over a warped sense of duty and a child he did not want—returns to the US to pursue his dream of becoming a mixed martial artist. After spending his adolescence defending his bisexuality, Michael makes his mark in New York’s fashion industry while nursing resentment for a community that never accepted him. Farria traces the lives of brothers Michael and Gabriel and their friend Simon from adolescence to their mid-twenties, through Oklahoma, Afghanistan, New York, Somalia, Ukraine, and New Orleans. Revolutions of All Colors is a brash, funny, and honest look at the evolution of characters we don’t often see—black nerds and veterans bucking their community’s rigid parameters of permissible expression while reconciling love of their country with the injustice of it. At its core, this is a novel about the uniquely American dilemma of chiseling out an identity in a country still struggling to define itself.