Powell was born July 31, 1978 in Little Rock, Arkansas.[3] The child of an Air Force officer, Powell's family moved often, living in Montana and Alabama before returning to Little Rock. Powell attended North Little Rock High School and began self-publishing comics in 1992. That same year he founded the punk rock band Soophie Nun Squad with high school friends.[2]
He graduated from 1996, and briefly attended George Washington University in Washington, DC. He transferred to the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City, where he majored in Cartooning. Beginning in 2005, while at SVA, he would send Chris Staros and Brett Warnock, the founders of Top Shelf Productions, copies of every book he made.[4] He graduated in 2000 after receiving the Outstanding Cartooning Student award and the Shakespeare & Company Books Self-Publishing Grant, with which he funded the first issue of Walkie Talkie.[citation needed]
Career
Powell owned DIYpunk record label Harlan Records and performed in several punk bands including Universe, Divorce Chord, WAIT, and Soophie Nun Squad.[citation needed]
His 2008 graphic novel Swallow Me Whole won the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Debut and Outstanding Artist, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Young Adult Fiction category. It received the 2009 Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel, and was also nominated for Best Writer/Artist and Best Lettering.[citation needed]
In the early 2010s, Powell learned that Top Shelf would be publishing March, an autobiographical graphic novel trilogy about the life of civil rights leader and United States Congressman John Lewis, which had already been written by Lewis and his colleague, Andrew Aydin. A few weeks later, Powell was contacted by Chris Staros, who suggested he try out for the assignment. Although he already had other projects lined up, Powell sent some demo pages to Lewis and Aydin, who over the course of their subsequent correspondence realized that Powell would be well-suited for the job. Although Powell had illustrated stories that were "true to life," such as the 2012 graphic Silence of our Friends, this would be the first time he would depict real-life historical figures, 300 of which Powell estimates are rendered in total in the trilogy. The scene in which Lewis meets Martin Luther King Jr. for the first time was the first page Powell drew for March, and although he found approaching that page difficult, says it made subsequent depictions of real-life people easier. Powell's approach was to develop a visual shorthand for each real person he had to draw, in the form of a "master drawing" to act as a reference template for that person's features, one that emphasized the person's skull structure, in lieu of referring constantly to photo reference in the course of the project, so that the characters would not look "too stale or photo-derived." He employed lifestyle and illustration books from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as Google searches, to depict fashion and automobiles of given time periods accurately. Lewis says he found Powell's renditions of scenes from his early life "very moving."[4] Top Shelf published March: Book One in November 2013. In January 2017, the American Library Association awarded March: Book Three the 2017 Printz Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction, and the Sibert Medal. It was the first time a single book won four ALA awards.[6] The trilogy received the Carter G. Woodson Book Award in 2017.[7]
On May 15, 2014, Powell was present at that year's commencement ceremony for his alma mater, the School of Visual Arts, when the school presented an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts to Powell's March collaborator, John Lewis. The second volume of March was scheduled for January 2015 release.[8]
