About Kevin M. Cowan

Kevin M. Cowan is a writer, technologist, musician, filmmaker, and seeker of the sublime — a creative force whose work crosses genres, mediums, and decades.

Originally from Lincoln, Nebraska, Kevin began his collegiate journey on a football scholarship at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. There, he served as a student senator during his freshman year, igniting early passions for leadership, dialogue, and creative expression. That same curiosity would later carry him to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he began writing professionally during his junior year.

It wasn’t long before his work began to stand out. Kevin joined the Daily Nebraskan as a feature writer and reviewer, earning recognition for his bold voice and thoughtful insight. After publishing his first novel, Coffee with Kuwait — a metaphysical, character-driven exploration of art and spirit — Kevin returned to the Nebraskan to create Alpine Dolphins, a boundary-pushing series of short stories, becoming the first person hired by the paper specifically to write fiction.

This dual life — half journalist, half novelist — quickly expanded. As Fiction Editor of The Great Red Shark (now The Reader), Kevin nurtured experimental narratives and produced works like Matchbook Spies and Nick with Nixon at Night, eventually compiling these stories into Living in the Demon Box.

But writing was just the beginning.

Kevin evolved into a cutting-edge technologist, specializing in AI, NLP, and Search Engineering. He has designed and implemented retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, trained custom GPT models, and built robust, scalable applications — often blurring the line between logic and lyricism. He is, in every sense, a coder-poet.

And his creative energy didn’t stop at the page or the terminal. As a drummer and percussionist, Kevin recorded two albums — one of which he produced entirely — and played in two bands: Garth Melvin, a Midwestern psychedelic garage group with raw, surrealistic edges; and Food for Robots, a neo-folk-anti-rock duo built on rhythm, mood, and resistance to the mainstream.

With a camera in hand and a soundtrack in his head, Kevin also created music videos and a documentary series titled Wild Houses, exploring the aesthetics of remote construction and survivalism. He directed, shot, edited, and scored the works himself. Long before digital storytelling became mainstream, Kevin pioneered interactive media with Fantasy Fest Key West 1996, an immersive CD-ROM experience capturing the spirit of a uniquely Floridian festival.

Today, Kevin M. Cowan is building a creative archive and digital hub — kevinmcowan.com — to bring his body of work together and share it with the world. Whether crafting fiction, writing code, laying down a rhythm, or splicing scenes on the timeline, Kevin continues to explore the edges of art, insight, and invention — with restless energy and deep soul.