A woman with long, wavy hair sitting on a couch, holding a book, smiling and looking to the side in a cozy, well-lit room decorated with plants, a birdcage, and a lamp.

Michelle is a writer, editor, and attorney. Her fiction is included in The Forge Literary Magazine, Arts & Letters, Lunch Ticket, Fractured Lit, and many others. She has been awarded a Gold Circle Award for fiction from the Columbia University Scholastic Press Association, and she’s been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes.

Michelle holds a BFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago and a Juris Doctor. She is the Editor in Chief of House of Arcanum, a journal of curated fiction. Many of her stories have been finalists for various prizes (including the Wright Prize for literary military fiction), and her short story collection was a finalist for the Regal House Publishing’s W.S. Porter Prize.

Michelle is also a combat veteran of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, former helicopter pilot, Bronze Star recipient, and mother of a child with severe disabilities—all of which inform her work.

She is seeking representation for novel-in-stories exploring the intersection of motherhood and war. Contact her at Hello@MichelleReneeBrady.com.

With the help of the editorial staff of War, Literature, and the Arts, Consequence, and others, Michelle’s proposed a 2026 AWP panel to discuss the role creative writing plays in cultivating empathy called Literature as Body Armor: How Words Can Stop Bullets. As moderator, Michelle will lead a discussion with:

Mara Karlin is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities under four administrations, a Brookings Institute Fellow and Director for Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, and author of The Inheritance.

Benjamin Busch is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer. He served 16 years as a Marine Corps officer, with two combat tours in Iraq. He also wrote and directed Sympathetic Details and BRIGHT and acted in HBO’s The Wire and Generation Kill. He’s the author of the memoir Dust to Dust (Ecco). He served as a volunteer combat skills trainer in Ukraine a week after the Russian invasion and returned twice as a photographer for Esquire Magazine.

A girl standing in front of a destroyed building with debris and rubble scattered around. Overlaid text discusses literature as body armor and its role in stopping bullets, featuring authors Benjamin Busch, Mara Karlin, Hugh Martin, and Elizabeth Lukács Chesla, with a yellow headline and a yellow question about peace and war.

Hugh Martin is a poet and author of The Stick Soldiers and In Country. He’s the editor of War, Literature, and the Arts Journal, USAF Professor of English, and recipient of a Yaddo residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Sewanee Writers' Conference Fellowship.

Elizabeth Lukács Chesla is a writer, teacher, translator, and fiction editor of Consequence Forum. She holds an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and teaches literature at Gwynedd Mercy University. Her award-winning novel, You Cannot Forbid the Flower (2023), is a fictional account of her father’s experience in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.