Kevin Ott

Kevin Ott is a writer, composer, and musician. In 2003, he earned a B. A. in Music Composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara, College of Creative Studies. In 2014, he began work on "Shadowlands and Songs of Light: An Epic Journey into Joy and Healing" after U2 announced the surprise release of "Songs of Innocence" on Sept. 9, 2014, an event that served as a catalyst for the book.

His online articles about music have been recognized by institutions such as Yale University and leading voices in the U2 scholarly community. In 2018, Kevin attended the U2 conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland and was a speaker at the conference. He used the opportunity to visit iconic Belfast locations tied to the life of C. S. Lewis, though this interest began decades before Kevin's visit to Belfast.

As a teenager in 1996, Kevin visited the city of Oxford, England and Oxford University where he attended a poetry reading at Magdalen College, met the president of their poetry society, and visited the locations where C. S. Lewis lived and worked in Oxford. This experience helped ignite a lifelong interest in the writings, biography, religious beliefs, and philosophical views of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the other Inklings.

Kevin's other passions are philanthropy and global humanitarian work with a grassroots emphasis. He is especially interested in non-Western, foreign-born humanitarian and Gospel-focused movements. Kevin also uses his music to raise funds and awareness for non-religious humanitarian organizations such as Self-Help Africa to address the severe famines in Africa and the Navajo Water Project to bring aid to the Navajo in their severe water crisis in the United States.