Kevin Bowen

Kevin Bowen was drafted and served in the First Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969. He is a 1973 graduate of the University of Massachusetts–Boston. A former Danforth Fellow and Fulbright Fellow at New College, Oxford, he earned his PhD in English literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He worked as an aide and speechwriter for Lt. Governor Thomas P. O’Neill III prior to becoming director of the Veterans’ Upward Bound Program at University of Massachusetts–Boston in 1984. Since 1987, he has returned to Vietnam many times, initiating cultural, educational, and humanitarian exchanges. He is an adjunct associate professor in the English department, where he teaches courses in creative writing, literature and war, and the literature of the Vietnam War. Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong, his first collection of poetry, was published by Curbstone Press in 1994. His poems have appeared in Agni, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Witness, and other places. He has edited a special feature on contemporary Vietnamese poetry in the winter 1996 issue of Manoa. With Bruce Weigl he is coeditor of Writing Between the Lines: Writings on War and Its Consequences published by the University of Massachusetts Press in February 1997. He was appointed codirector of the Joiner Center in 1984 and has been director of the center since 1993. He lives with his wife and two children in Dorchester, Massachusetts.