Kim Powers Books in Order

Kim Powers was born in Texas and grew up in McKinney, a North Texas town that later became the setting of Rules for Being Dead. He came of age around movie houses, libraries, family turmoil, and the kind of close small-town observation that can stay with a writer for decades.

He got there by a crooked path.

Powers studied drama at Austin College, then earned an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, where he was managing director of Theater magazine. At first, he expected theater and film to be the center of his working life. In New York he spent years developing projects, producing, and writing screenplays, including the one that became the independent film Finding North.

The move into journalism was almost accidental. While volunteering with God's Love We Deliver in the 1990s, he met a writer from Good Morning America, learned how television news really worked, and took a temp job that turned into a career. That mix of timing, curiosity, and sympathy for messy human stories proved useful. He went on to write for Good Morning America, 20/20, and other ABC programs, and his television work brought him Emmy, Peabody, and Edward R. Murrow honors.

He has said the lesson was simple: if you want to be a writer, you have to write.

That private push became public with The History of Swimming, his first book and still the clearest key to the rest of his work. The memoir follows his frantic search for his missing twin brother, Tim, but it also circles back through a hard Texas childhood marked by his mother's death, his father's alcoholism, family mental illness, and the pressures of growing up gay in another era. Readers often connect with the way the book moves like both a family story and a suspense story.

After that, Powers kept changing form without letting go of the things that mattered to him. Capote in Kansas uses Truman Capote, Harper Lee, and the Clutter murders as the basis for a ghost story about friendship, ambition, guilt, and old wounds. Dig Two Graves turns toward pure suspense, sending former Olympic champion Ethan Holt through a brutal series of tasks after his daughter is kidnapped. Even when the plots get bigger, the emotional core stays personal.

Then came Rules for Being Dead, a novel that brings many of his favorite concerns back to North Texas. Set in late 1960s McKinney, it follows a movie-obsessed boy trying to learn how his mother died while her spirit searches for the same answer. It is funny in places, sad in others, and deeply interested in how children piece together the adult world from scraps, rumors, and half-truths.

Family is everywhere in Powers's work.

So are secrecy, grief, queer identity, damaged parents, and people trying to love one another without much of a map. Texas matters too, not just as scenery, but as memory, accent, weather, and pressure. Outside his books, he has also written for the stage. His play Sidekicked, about Vivian Vance, found an enthusiastic audience in production. He lives between New York City and Asbury Park, New Jersey, is married to costume designer Jess Goldstein, and still seems drawn to the point where performance, storytelling, and private life meet.