Ron Powers is a Pulitzer Prize– and Emmy Award–winning journalist and author of many critically acclaimed and bestselling books, most recently No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Illness in America (Hachette Books 2017), which was a finalist for PEN America’s E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. He is the author of Mark Twain: A Life (Free Press 2006), a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Flags of Our Fathers (Bantam 2000), with James Bradley, which was adapted into a major motion picture directed by Clint Eastwood. He also collaborated with the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy on his bestselling memoirs, True Compass (Twelve 2009). Powers’ other books include Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore (St. Martin’s), Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain (Basic), and Last Flag Down: The Epic Journey of the Last Confederate Warship with John Baldwin (Crown).

He has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, where he became the first television critic to win the Pulitzer Prize. In 1985, he won an Emmy Award for his work on CBS News Sunday Morning. He has contributed to leading magazines and newspapers including the New York Times Book Review, Atlantic Monthly, and Smithsonian.