Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian American poet, novelist and editor. He is known for work that links questions of belief, identity and recovery with close attention to language. His writing includes the poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf (2017) and Pilgrim Bell (2021), as well as the novel Martyr! (2024), a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award.

His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Kaveh Akbar was born in Tehran in 1989 and moved to the United States as a young child. He grew up in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Indiana. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Purdue University, an MFA from Butler University and a PhD in creative writing from Florida State University.

He began establishing himself through poems published in journals such as The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Best American Poetry. His chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (2017), introduced themes that continued in his later work. Calling a Wolf a Wolf explored addiction and spiritual hunger through direct, lyrical lines. It won multiple prizes, including the Levis Reading Prize, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prizes.

Pilgrim Bell followed in 2021, examining faith, language and presence. It was named a book of the year by Time, NPR and the Guardian.

Akbar also edited and promoted poetry. He founded the interview site Divedapper in 2014 and, in 2020, became poetry editor of The Nation. In 2022, he edited The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine, gathering poems from many traditions and eras. He later co-edited Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance (2023) with Paige Lewis.

His debut novel, Martyr!, was published in 2024. It presents Cyrus Shams, the son of Iranian immigrants, newly sober and searching for meaning in his family’s past. The book follows his interest in martyrs and his effort to understand the deaths that shaped his life, including the loss of his mother in a plane disaster.

His search leads him toward an artist living in the Brooklyn Museum and toward stories of war, grief and inherited belief. The narrative links poetry, memory and humour in a compact style.

The New York Times listed Martyr! among its ten best books of the year, and the novel later received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the American Book Award.

Akbar’s essays, poems and commentary have appeared in the Atlantic, GQ, Paris Review and the New York Times. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Poetry Foundation and Civitella Ranieri. He has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and multiple Pushcart Prizes.

Kaveh Akbar teaches at the University of Iowa, where he serves as the Roy J. Carver Professor of English.

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan