ABout Basil

Basil Paquet is a poet, retired editor, publisher and corporate HR executive. His new poetry collection Group Shot: Poems of the Vietnam War & Its Aftermath will be published by Rootstock Publishers in 2027. Paquet holds BA and MA degrees in Literature from the University of Connecticut. He was drafted in 1966 at the start of his senior year in college. He opposed the Vietnam War, volunteered as a conscientious objector Army medic in Vietnam in 1967-68, and refused to bear arms against the Vietnamese. He received the Army’s commendation medal for meritorious service.‍ ‍After the war, Paquet founded 1st Casualty Press with fellow VVAW members to edit and publish the trailblazing anthologies Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans, and Free Fire Zone: Short Stories by Vietnam Veterans, as well as edit 1st Casualty’s unpublished third anthology, Postmortem: Short Stories and Poems by Vietnam Veterans. Paquet’s poems have appeared in among others: The New York Review of Books, Freedomways, Midwest Magazine, WIN Magazine, New Times, Long Island Review, and Jamaica Arts Review. Paquet won the 1969 Wallace Stevens Award for poetry.