Richard Powers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Swanlund Chair, Center for Advanced Study Professor of English
Richard Powers, who received his bachelor’s and master’s of arts in 1978 and 1980, respectively, at the University of Illinois, is a professor in the Department of English and a full-time member of the Beckman Institute Cognitive Neuroscience group on the Urbana-Champaign campus.
Named in 1996 to the University’s endowed Swanlund Chair in English and appointed in 1999 to the Center for Advanced Study, Powers continues to write, teach, and travel. A prolific and critically acclaimed author, his tenth novel, Generosity: An Enhancement, is scheduled for publication on Sept. 29, 2009. The book is described as a “playful and provocative novel about the happiness gene.”
At Illinois, Powers teaches a graduate seminar in multimedia authoring and an undergraduate course in the mechanics of narrative, and he has undertaken stints at other universities as well. A cache of videos related to his novels, including Galatea 2.2, Plowing the Dark, The Gold Bug Variations, The Time of Our Singing and The Echo Maker, were posted to Ninth Letter, a literary journal published at the U of I. The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award in 2007, was composed on a tablet PC using voice recognition software.
The Evanston, Illinois, native spent five years in Thailand as a child. Keenly interested in science and art, he enrolled at Illinois as a physics major, but switched to English/rhetoric. After finishing graduate school at Illinois, he went to work on his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. In Understanding Richard Powers by Joseph Dewey, Powers concluded: “I’m going to put everything that I know in this book, because I am never going to get another shot at this … Afterwards, I figured, I’d have to go back and do jobs that people are willing to pay for.”
The book was a critical success and Powers realized that he could make a living from writing. He moved to the Netherlands, wrote Prisoner’s Dilemma, described by Dewey as “an unsettling work that audaciously juxtaposed Disney and the logic of nuclear warfare.” The Gold Bug Variations, “a dense and luminous story of love and death that intricately braids the metaphors of genetics, computer sceince, and polyphonic music, “ was also completed in the Netherlands.
Powers returned to the U o f I in 1992, accepting a position as writer-in-residence. And write he does. All of his books, Powers wrote in an interview in the February 2007 issue of The Believer literary magazine, have tried to “explore different ways of connecting past and present, fact and fiction, induction and intuition, essay and narrative. Each book has tried to hybridize those disparate elements in different ways.”
He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. Powers was awarded a MacArthur Fellow in 1989 and a Lannan Literary Award in 1999. In that same year, he was named one of five "Writers of the Decade" by Esquire magazine. Other awards he has been given for the body of his work include the Corrington Award for Literary Excellence and the Dos Passos Prize For Literature. He’s also won the Ambassador Book Award, W. H. Smith Literary Award, James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the American Society of Historians, was a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award four times, and was included in lists for best books in 2003 by the Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsday, London Evening Standard, Time Out (London) and the San Jose Mercury News.