Tower was born in Vancouver in 1973 but grew up in North Carolina. He received a B.A. in anthropology and sociology from Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia University. He divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York].

Tower is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, the 2002 Plimpton (Discovery) Prize from The Paris Review, and a Henfield Foundation Award. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Tower's first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned in 2009. Significantly, the book was reviewed twice in the New York Times, by both Edmund White and Michiko Kakutani. Kakutani picked it as one of her ten best books of 2009. It was a finalist for The Story Prize In June, 2010, Tower was named as one of The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" luminary fiction writers. On June 10, 2010, he was presented with the Tenth Annual New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, a $10,000 prize for an American writer under 40.