Garry Craig Powell

I started writing as an undergraduate at Cambridge. Then for two decades I travelled and taught. I lived in Spain and Poland, in Portugal for ten years, and the United Arab Emirates for eight years. In 1998, I moved to the Sonora Desert, to begin an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona.

After another stint in the Middle East between 2000 and 2003, I returned to the USA and began work on Stoning the Devil, a linked collection of stories that portrays life in the Gulf. I'd taught female undergraduates on a women's campus of an Arab university for five years, so I had rare insights for a western man. I wrote about the lives of women in the Middle East, whom I felt had not been truly portrayed. Stoning the Devil was published in August 2012 by Skylight Press, and praised in the feminist press and also by George Singleton and Arab-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye.

From 2004 to 2017 I taught Creative Writing at the University of Central Arkansas, eventually becoming an Associate Professor. Since then I have been a full-time writer in northern Portugal. Our Parent Who Art in Heaven, my debut novel, a satire on the woke takeover of academia, was published by Flame Books on May 15, 2022.