Kevin Powers

Born in Virginia in a family with a long tradition of military service, Kevin Powers joined the U.S. Army at the age of seventeen. In 2004, he was sent to Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq, to serve for a year as a machine-gunner in the Iraq War. After an honorable discharge from the military in 2005, he dedicated himself to literature, earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Texas at Austin. In 2012, inspired by his experience as a soldier in Iraq, he published his first novel, The Yellow Birds, which meant to convey a sense of the complex psychological impact of war on an individual soldier. Powers later published a debut collection of poetry, Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting (2014) and a second novel, A Shout in the Ruins (2018), about the violence and repercussions of the American Civil War in Virginia.