Books in Order: A Comprehensive Guide to Kevin Powers' Works

Kevin Powers served in Iraq as a U.S. Army machine gunner from 2004 to 2005, and that experience shapes everything he has written since. Born and raised in Virginia, he went on to an MFA at the University of Texas at Austin as a Michener Fellow in Poetry, then debuted in 2012 with The Yellow Birds — a novel that hit the New York Times bestseller list and earned a spot on the Guardian First Book Award longlist.

The poetry training is audible in his prose, which manages to be lyrical and brutally honest at once. He has published three novels across eleven years, The Yellow Birds through 2023's A Line in the Sand, and this guide orders them by publication so his development reads clearly.