Background
Tower was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, but grew up in North Carolina.
Tower was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, but grew up in North Carolina.
Wesleyan University; Columbia University.
In 2009 he published his first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) to much critical acclaim. His short fiction has also been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, McSweeney"s, Vice, Harper"s Magazine, A Public Space, Fence and other periodicals. He played guitar in the punk band Hellbender for 6 years beginning his senior year of high school.
He received a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology and sociology from Wesleyan University and an Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from Columbia University.
After graduating from Wesleyan, he traveled around the United States doing odd jobs. He began his professional career when he convinced an editor at The Washington Post Magazine to publish an article about a carnival worker
Tower is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, the 2002 Plimpton (Discovery) Prize from The Paris Review, and a Henfield Foundation Award. Writing Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Tower"s first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned in 2009.
The book was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Edmund White and in the New York Times by Michiko Kakutani.
Kakutani picked it as one of her ten best books of 2009. In June, 2010, Tower was named as one of The New Yorker magazine"s "20 under 40" luminary fiction writers. On June 10, 2010, he was presented with the Tenth Annual New York Public Library"s Young Lions Fiction Award, a $10,000 prize for an American writer under 40.
His work was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2010.
Personal As of 2009, Tower divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Brooklyn, New New York