William Kowalski

Kowalski also writes shorter books for adults with literacy challenges, called Rapid Reads. These are published by Orca Books' Raven imprint. These are The Barrio Kings (April 2010), The Way It Works (2010), Something Noble (March 2012), and Just Gone (September 2013). His fifth Rapid Reads book, The Innocence Device, will be published by Orca/Raven in the fall of 2014. Something Noble has been translated into Swedish and Korean.

Kowalski is the author of five works of literary fiction. Eddie's Bastard (1999), Somewhere South of Here (2001), The Adventures of Flash Jackson (2003), and The Good Neighbor (2004) were all published in the U.S. by HarperCollins and in the United Kingdom by Transworld/Doubleday/Black Swan. The Hundred Hearts (2013) was published by Thomas Allen Publishers (now Dundurn) in Canada and will be published in German by Eichborn/Luebbe in 2015.

The novel earned Kowalski a place in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program in 1999 and won the 2001 Exclusive Books Boeke Prize (South Africa), putting his novel in the company of such other well-known novels as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Poisonwood Bible, Life of Pi, The Kite Runner and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

In 1990, Kowalski matriculated at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a four-year program whose curriculum consists of the "Great Books" of Western Civilization, including not only literature, but also philosophy, mathematics, the sciences, music and art. He believes this program made him "more well-rounded, and as a result, a more interesting person ... ".

Kowalski has said that he realized he wanted to be a writer when he was about six years old, and that he began to pursue that dream soon after. In 1988, Kowalski attended the Mercyhurst College Summer Writer's Institute, where he studied under Dr. Ken Schiff (founder of the Institute) and the late W.S. "Jack" Kuniczak (novelist and noted translator of Sienkiewicz). He matriculated at Boston's Emerson College in 1988, where he majored in Creative Writing, but dropped out in 1989 to devote himself to writing full-time, believing that he was focusing too much on writing at the expense of gaining the life experiences he needed to have something to write about:

William John Kowalski III (born August 3, 1970 in Parma, Ohio) is an American-Canadian novelist and screenwriter.

Kowalski is married to Alexandra Nedergaard (b. 1968) of Toronto, Ontario. They have two children.

Kowalski is the eldest child of Dr. William John Kowalski, Jr. of Buffalo, N.Y. (born 1942) and Kathleen Emily Siepel of Angola, N.Y. (b. 1942). In 1974, the family moved to Erie, Pennsylvania. He attended Erie Day School from 1976–1984, Cathedral Preparatory School for Boys from 1984–85, and McDowell High School from 1985–88, where he played bass in the rock group Gideon Winter, which was named after a major character in the novel Floating Dragon by Peter Straub. He also acted in numerous high school and community theater productions.