Johnson received his BA from the University of Chicago in 2002.īorn in West Chicago, he lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles. Prior to his work in Iraq, he conducted research on political Islamism as a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt. Kirk Wallace Johnson served in Iraq with the US Agency for International Development in Baghdad and Fallujah as the Agency’s first co-ordinator for reconstruction in the war. He is a Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, and the recipient of fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Wurlitzer Foundation. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century.

Agency for International Development in Baghdad and then Fallujah as the Agency's first coordinator for reconstruction in the war-torn city.

Eva Holland, Outside, The Best Summer Books A fascinating account of a bizarre crime. Johnson previously served in Iraq with the U.S. That’s the case with Kirk Wallace Johnson’s The Feather Thief. whod risked everything to gather themand escaped into the darkness.Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Policy, among others. Though its non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller. Johnson is the author of The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century and To Be a Friend is Fatal: the Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind, which covers his work coordinating the reconstruction of Fallujah and his subsequent efforts on behalf of Iraqi refugees as the founder of the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies.

The feather thief kirk wallace johnson