Author Kevin Powers: Children of the Wild, in conversation with Aramis Calderon
Schedule
Thu, 18 Jun, 2026 at 06:30 pm
UTC-04:00Location
Safety Harbor Public Library | Safety Harbor, FL
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National Book Award finalist Author Kevin Powers will discuss his newest historical fiction Children of the Wild in conversation with author Aramis Calderon.Thursday, June 18th at 6:30 PM
Safety Harbor Public Library
101 2nd St. North
Safety Harbor, FL 34695
RSVP and reserve books for event pick up at https://shop.portkeybooks.com/powers
KEVIN POWERS
Kevin Powers was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, The Guardian First Book Award, the Prix Littéraire du Monde Prix Étranger, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, among other prizes, and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He was a James A. Michener Fellow in Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin from 2009–2012 and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. A US Army veteran of the Iraq war, he lives on Florida’s First Coast with his family.
CHILDREN OF THE WILD
From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Yellow Birds comes a gorgeous, haunting love story set in the Virginia mountains and on the battlefields of World War I France.
Ewer’s Rock, Virginia, 1917. Roy Young is restless, eager to leave this isolated rural valley for university and return with the technical knowledge to modernize his family’s farm and bring them properly into the twentieth century.
Samantha Hatton, the minister’s daughter and Roy’s best friend since childhood, knows that both Roy and the town expect them to marry. But Samantha, a daring and ambitious young woman, hungers for more.
Above them on the mountain, tending to a lost herd of cattle, is silent Ennis Duke, the mysterious wild boy whose arrival in the valley will upend Ewer’s Rock’s understanding of itself and its place in the world.
Within a year, the lives of these three young people will be dramatically transformed. America has joined the Great War, and Roy and Ennis feel duty-bound to join the fight. In the crucible of conflict, thousands of miles from the familiarity of home, the two men forge a fierce bond. Meanwhile, back in Virginia, Samantha’s love and courage endure unthinkable sacrifice in a corner of the world fractured by violence.
With the spare and exquisite prose and the profound insight that made The Yellow Birds a landmark work of American fiction, Kevin Powers illuminates the savage, complex, and timeless bonds of loyalty, honor, and heroism. Children of the Wild captures what it means to be human in times of loss—and how, even in darkness, the light of friendship and love endures.
ARAMIS CALDERON
Aramis Calderon is a Marine veteran with a pen. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tampa. He has published poetry, short stories, the novel Dismount, and his memoir Fugitive Son. He currently resides around Tampa, Florida where every week he meets with fellow veteran writers in the DD-214 Writers’ Workshop.
FUGITIVE SON
Aramís Calderón was eleven in 1992 when federal marshals conducted a nighttime raid at the Baton Rouge apartment where he lived with his mother and four siblings. They were searching for Aramís’s father, who had escaped from a nearby federal prison. Once satisfied with the answers from Aramís’s mother, the marshals departed. At daybreak, so did Aramís’s family—and drove toward a rendezvous with his father, who had fled to South Florida. Thus began an eight-month ordeal of constant moves, family aliases, and drug deals.
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Where is it happening?
Safety Harbor Public Library, 101 2nd St N,Safety Harbor,FL,United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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