Richard Powers

Former Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing, Stanford University. National Book Award-winning author. Titles include Orfeo, The Echo Maker, and Operation Wandering Soul. His novels are known for their probing explorations of the biggest questions facing contemporary society, especially as they involve the human impacts of science and technology. Powers’s work fronts questions of the balance between artistic imagination and the real world of material and physical responsibilities with an unflinching attention to the drama of human consciousness and to the depth of our emotional responses to the world. Powers has a background in science; in his last semester of undergraduate studies, he changed his major from physics to english literature. Later, he worked as a computer programmer, and eventually quit to write full time. He chose not to pursue a PhD, partially because he does not believe in such strict specialization.