About

Kevin Richard Kaiser (Aw-o-tan Nisgah) publishes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry internationally.

Born in Orange County, California, they spent most of the first twenty-seven years of their life residing in the Golden State. In their early twenties, they took his first creative writing class and met James M. Tate. Around this time, Kevin’s maternal grandmother died. Both appreciated their writing and encouraged them to keep writing. They listened.

At age twenty-five, while living in Long Beach in the house of their maternal grandparents, they decided once and for all to be a writer. Two years later, they moved to Pittsburgh to attend Chatham University, where they earned his MFA in Creative Writing and met their partner, Lake Angela, a poet, dancer, choreographer, and founder of Companyia Lake Angela.

They moved to a suburb of Dallas and began practicing Blackfoot ways with the Many Faces People. During this period, Kevin/Aw-o-tan became a sagekeeper, poured his first lodges, and published some poetry. They also spent those five years teaching English in universities and colleges and tutoring privately, in addition to writing articles commissioned by an art gallery. Meanwhile, Lake Angela worked toward a Ph.D.

Upon completion, Lake Angela and Kevin moved to Barcelona, where Kevin enrolled in the doctoral program in Humanities at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. After two years abroad, the couple moved to Orange County, California, where Kevin completed the writing of their thesis. The couple then moved to a suburb of Kansas City, during which time Punt Volat was founded, the first issue being published on the final day of 2019. In addition to teaching at a community college, Kevin began freelance web designing and continued freelance writing, including publishing articles with In Defense of Animals. After a brief return to California at the onset of the pandemic, Lake Angela and Kevin now reside in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Kevin works as a librarian and teacher.

Kevin’s first book, An Ethics Beyond: Posthumanist Animal Encounters and Variable Kindness in the Fiction of George Saunders, is the first monograph on the American author’s fiction and explores how posthumanist ethics and nonhuman animals appear in his writing. It is available now from Publicacions de la Universitat de València and can be ordered directly from Kevin.