Mark Powell

Firebird is set during the 2014 Russia-Ukraine conflict. A U.S. arms deal gone south takes you into the underground world of political operatives, Ivy League criminals and a hedge fund billionaire with eyes on the presidency.

Blood Kin received the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel in 2005, awarded annually by the Knoxville Writer's Guild and the University of Tennessee.

Mark Powell (born 1976) is an American novelist. He is the author of six novels, most recently Small Treasons and Firebird. A highly decorated author, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, as well as two Fulbright Fellowships. Educated at The Citadel, The University of South Carolina, and Yale Divinity School, Powell teaches in the English Department at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He repeatedly serves as the fiction workshop leader for the Hindman Settlement School's Appalachian Writers Workshop and the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival at Lincoln Memorial University. Powell's early work has established him in the southern Appalachian tradition alongside writers such as Pamela Duncan, Silas House and Ron Rash. His recent fiction is more global in scope, in the vein of Robert Stone and Bob Shacochis.

In the late summer of 1944, making his way northward to Asheville through the Blue Ridge Mountains, Ernest meets fellow travelers—drifters, veterans, and outsiders—who are willing to help him. An aging hermit and woodsman, once a glassblower, rescues and revives Ernest after a particularly chilly evening.

Small Treasons is a literary thriller set in North Georgia. It tells the story of John and Tess Maynard, whose marriage is tested when one of John's old CIA colleagues asks him to spy on a professor at his university. The novel explores terrorism, ISIS, and the wreck of 21st century America, and the way old sins never leave us.