Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar (b. 15 January 1989; Persian: کاوه اکبر) is an Iranian American poet, novelist, and editor. He is the author of the poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell and of the novel Martyr!, a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize.

He is director of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Iowa. He is the founder of Divedapper and Poetry Editor of The Nation. In 2018, NPR called him "poetry's biggest cheerleader". In 2024, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Early life and education
Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1989. He moved to the United States when he was two years old, and grew up across the United States including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Indiana.

Akbar received his bachelor's degree from Purdue, his MFA from Butler University, and his PhD in creative writing from Florida State University.

Poetry
Akbar received a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from Poetry Foundation, and in 2017, his poetry chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic was published by Sibling Rivalry Press. Of it, the American poet Patricia Smith said: "Kaveh Akbar has written one of the best books of poetry I've ever read. Lyrical, seductive."

Akbar followed it months later with his full-length collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf, released by Alice James Books in the US and Penguin Books in the UK to acclaim. Kenyon Review called Akbar "a sumptuous, remarkably painterly poet," going on to say: "A number of poets over the years have made alcoholism a major subject—Franz Wright, with his lacerating lines, comes to mind, as does John Berryman and his theatrical derangements. But few have written about this exchange I’m describing—spirituality for spirits, and vice versa—with as much beauty or generosity as Kaveh Akbar. His debut collection is about addiction and its particularities but also touches something larger and harder to point to, to talk about—existential emptiness and the ways substances often offer respite from our spiritual hunger."

Calling a Wolf a Wolf was shortlisted for the Forward Prizes's Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and won Ploughshares's John C. Zacharis First Book Award and the Virginia Commonwealth University's Levis Reading Prize. It further received a 2017 Julie Suk Award and a 2018 First Horizon Award, and was selected by NPR for its Book Concierge Guide to 2017’s Great Reads. One of the poems, "Heritage," won the Poetry Society of America's Lucille Medwick Memorial Award in 2016.

Akbar's second full-length collection, Pilgrim Bell, was published in 2021 by Graywolf Press. It was named a best book of the year by Time, The Guardian, and NPR, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection.

The Times Literary Supplement wrote about it: "The work here is a measured, quiet pondering of intense subjects and subjectivities. But it would be erroneous to mistake this for lack of force. Akbar is simply interrogating his life and his place in the world with greater stillness." A Ploughshares essay called the book "songs of collective personhood—the way our hearts could fit in each other’s chests." The New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young wrote that the collection's central poem "The Palace" "defamiliarizes language" and "recalls the epic mode, but also the ars poetica—the poem about making poetry."

Akbar's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Best American Poetry, The New Republic, Paris Review, PBS NewsHour, Tin House, and elsewhere.

Fiction
Akbar's debut novel, Martyr!, was published in 2024 by Alfred A. Knopf. It received critical acclaim, became a New York Times bestseller, was named one of the paper's Best Books of the Year So Far, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize.

The New Yorker applauded it: "Akbar’s writing has the musculature of poetry that can’t rely on narrative propulsion and so propels itself." The Boston Globe wrote that it is "Stuffed with ideas, gorgeous images, and a surprising amount of humor." Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Junot Diaz called it "incandescent" and its main character Cyrus Shams "an indelible protagonist, haunted, searching, utterly magnetic."

At The New York Review of Books, Francine Prose noted: "There’s something immensely appealing about a meticulously written novel whose characters (Cyrus isn’t the only one) are busily searching for meaning. It’s a pleasure to read a book in which an obsession with the metaphysical, the spiritual, and the ethical is neither a joke nor an occasion for a sermon. And it’s cheering to see a first-time (or anytime) novelist go for the heavy stuff—family, death, love, addiction, art, history, poetry, redemption, sex, friendship, US-Iranian relations, God—and manage to make it engrossing, imaginative, and funny."

Curation
In 2014, Akbar founded the poetry interview website Divedapper, for contemporary poets to share their stories and writing. In 2020, he was named Poetry Editor of The Nation, a position previously held by Langston Hughes, Anne Sexton, and William Butler Yeats.

In 2022, Akbar edited The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine, released by Penguin Classics. It collects poetry from many cultures, ancient and modern, ranging from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome; to the Arab, Farsi, Hindi, and Urdu worlds; as well as the rest of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Selected poets include Enheduanna, Mirabai, Lucretius, Dante, Nazim Hikmet, and Gabriela Mistral. Akbar provides notes on individual poems. In a Times Literary Supplement review, Rowan Williams described the book as "poetry that detaches us from the world of instant gratification," calling it "A profoundly valuable collection, full of fresh perspective, and opening doors into all kinds of material that has been routinely neglected or patronized."

Film
Akbar wrote poems, alongside Ocean Vuong, for the 2018 film The Kindergarten Teacher, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Advocacy
When the Donald Trump administration announced its Muslim ban in 2017, Akbar compiled verses by poets from the countries and asked his followers to read them. The compilation garnered media coverage.

Teaching
Before moving to the University of Iowa, Akbar was associate professor of English at Purdue University. He also teaches in the low-residency fine art programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.

Personal life
Akbar is in recovery and has written about his struggles with addiction. In an interview with The Paris Review, he cites poetry as helping with his sobriety, saying, "Early in recovery, it was as if I'd wake up and ask, How do I not accidentally kill myself for the next hour? And poetry, more often than not, was the answer to that."

Akbar is married to the American poet Paige Lewis.

Awards and honors

 * 2024: Finalist for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize for Martyr!
 * 2024: One of The New York Times Best Books of the Year (So Far) for Martyr!
 * 2024: Guggenheim Fellowship
 * 2022: Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection for Pilgrim Bell
 * 2021: Book of the Year selection by NPR, Time, and The Guardian for Pilgrim Bell
 * 2019: Ploughshares's John C. Zacharis First Book Award for Calling a Wolf a Wolf
 * 2018: Virginia Commonwealth University's Levis Reading Prize for Calling a Wolf a Wolf
 * 2018: Shortlisted for the Forward Prizes's Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection for Calling a Wolf a Wolf
 * 2018: First Horizon Award for Calling a Wolf a Wolf
 * 2018: Pushcart Prize
 * 2017: Julie Suk Award for Calling a Wolf a Wolf
 * 2017: NPR's Great Reads for Calling a Wolf a Wolf
 * 2017: Pushcart Prize
 * 2016: Poetry Society of America's Lucille Medwick Memorial Award for "Heritage"
 * 2016: Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship

Poetry

 * Collections
 * Anthologies edited
 * Anthologies edited
 * Anthologies edited
 * Anthologies edited


 * List of poems