Kirk Savage began writing on public monuments and public space in the U.S. when he was a free-lance author in the early 1980s. His first publication was a piece in the West Coast literary magazine Threepenny Review on the controversy surrounding Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Since then he has gotten a steady job in academia, but his passion for the subject has remained as strong as ever. Monument Wars has literally been in the making for over twenty-five years.
Savage continues to write for general audiences on why we erect monuments and what they mean to us, most recently in the Washington Post. His 1997 book Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America won the John Hope Franklin Prize for best book published in American Studies in 1998.
Savage is now a professor in the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, a writer and visual artist, and their four daughters.