Kai Bird
Historian and biographer
Kai Bird is an American historian and biographer who co-wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus, which inspired the film Oppenheimer.
1 summary 14 min of listening
American Born 1951 in Eugene, United States
About Kai Bird
Kai Bird was born in 1951, and his father's work as a U.S. Foreign Service officer meant he grew up in the Middle East and South Asia, in places such as Jerusalem, Beirut and Bombay. He studied at Carleton College and Northwestern University. He wrote American Prometheus with the late Martin J. Sherwin. The book also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the Duff Cooper Prize for History. Bird is a contributing editor of The Nation. He has directed the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center in New York City since 2017, and he has held fellowships including a Guggenheim.