Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar (کاوه اکبر) is an Iranian-American writer.

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.

Akbar is a faculty member at University of Iowa and formerly Purdue University.

He also teaches in the low-residency fine art programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.

He is the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic, published by Sibling Rivalry Press, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, published by Alice James Books in the US and Penguin Books in the UK, and Pilgrim Bell published by Graywolf Press.

Of Portrait of the Alcoholic, American poet Patricia Smith said: "Kaveh Akbar has written one of the best books of poetry I've ever read."

In 2014, he founded the poetry interview website Divedapper.

He uses the website to give contemporary poets a space to share their stories and their writing.

In 2018, NPR called Akbar "poetry's biggest cheerleader".

With Ocean Vuong, he wrote poems for the 2018 film The Kindergarten Teacher, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal.

In 2018, he married the American poet Paige Lewis.

In 2019, The New Yorker published an online feature around Akbar's long poem "The Palace", and announced that his second full-length poetry collection, Pilgrim Bell, would be published in 2021 by Graywolf Press.

In 2022, Penguin Classics published The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine, edited by Kaveh Akbar.

His 2024 novel, Martyr!, is an autobiographical narrative.

Akbar is in recovery and writes openly 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."

In 2020, he was named Poetry Editor of The Nation, a position previously held by Langston Hughes, Anne Sexton, and William Butler Yeats.

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.