He then worked in a number of jobs before eventually settling in Santa Rosa, California, where he attended Sonoma State University.
[3] In addition to serving as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard (itself a recognition of both creative and scholarly talent),[4] Powell has won the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, a grant for the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Paul Engle Fellowship.
On February 3, 2010, after the publication of Chronic in 2009, Claremont Graduate University announced that Powell had won its prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
[7] His poetry collection Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys won the National Book Critics Circle Award (2012).
His work often moves back and forth between popular culture like movies and music and more complicated themes like religion and AIDS; he uses numerous rhetorical devices, especially puns, as bridges between these two spheres of experience.