Kevin Knodell covers the military and veterans in Hawaii and the greater Pacific for Civil Beat as a corps member for Report For America, a national nonprofit that places journalists in local news rooms.

Kevin has worked for small town newspapers, national magazines and digital media startups. As a freelance journalist he has reported from the field on Northeast Syria’s Kurdish-led Rojava Revolution, examined U.S.-China military relations, reported on wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, explored Iraqi Kurdistan’s night life and interviewed refugees using art to fight terrorist ideology.

His writing and photography have appeared at Playboy, The Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, Vice, The Nib, Crosscut and others. As a contributing editor at the conflict news collective War is Boring he spent as a year as the coordinator for the Iraq and Syria field team during the Yazidi Genocide and worked with the investigative news team.

Kevin’s most recent assignment before joining Civil Beat was as a correspondent for Black Rifle Coffee Company’s Coffee or Die Magazine embedded with U.S. troops as the COVID-19 pandemic prompted upended the war against ISIS militants and prompted a significant drawdown of western forces in the region.

He is the co-author of Machete Squad and The ‘Stan from Dead Reckoning Graphic Novels, was one of the lead writers of the War is Boring: True War Comics series and wrote the Acts of Valor comic series for Naval History with cartoonist Kelly Swann from 2017-2019.

Kevin has also worked as a comic shop clerk, a paint delivery driver, security guard, event photographer and various other odd jobs for beer and rent money. He was born and raised in Portland, Oregon and studied history at Pacific Lutheran University.