About Kevin Powers
Kevin Powers (born 1980) is an American fiction writer, poet, and Iraq War veteran. == Early life, tour, and education == Powers was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, the son of a factory worker and a postman. He attended James River High School and enlisted in the U.S. Army at the age of seventeen. Six years later, in 2004, he served a one-year tour in Iraq as a machine gunner assigned to an engineer unit. Powers served in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq, from February 2004 to March 2005. After his honorable discharge, Powers enrolled in Virginia Commonwealth University, where he graduated in 2008 with a bachelor's degree in English. He holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. == The Yellow Birds == Powers's first novel The Yellow Birds, which drew on his experiences in the Iraq War, garnered a lucrative advance from publisher Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown. It has been called "a classic of contemporary war fiction" by Michiko Kakutani, book critic for The New York Times. The magazine subsequently named the novel one of the publication's 10 favorite books of 2012.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.