Kaveh Akbar

Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1989,[2] and grew up across the United States including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Indiana.[3] He moved to the United States when he was only two years old. Before he moved to the U.S., his parents taught him how to talk by reading Muslim prayers.[4]

Akbar received his MFA from Butler University and his PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University.[5]

Akbar is a faculty member at Purdue University, Randolph College and Warren Wilson College. He is the author of Pilgrim Bell, published by Graywolf Press, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, published by Alice James Books in the US and Penguin Books in the UK, and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic, published by Sibling Rivalry Press. In 2014, he founded the poetry interview website Divedapper. In 2020, hew 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,[6] Tin House, and elsewhere.[7][8][9] Akbar founded the website Divedapper.com, where he interviewed major voices in contemporary American poetry.[6] In 2018, NPR called Akbar "poetry's biggest cheerleader."[10] With Ocean Vuong, he wrote poems for the 2018 film The Kindergarten Teacher, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal.[11]

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.[12] In 2022, Penguin Classics will publish The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine, edited by Kaveh Akbar.[13]

Akbar is in recovery and writes openly about his struggles with addiction.[14] 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."[15]

In 2018, he married the American poet Paige Lewis.[16]

• Pilgrim Bell a best book of the year NPR, Time, The Guardian
• Winner of a 2017 and 2018 Pushcart Prize[17]
• Levis Reading Prize
• John C. Zacharis First Book Award
• Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship[18]
• Winner of a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award for a poem on a humanitarian theme

• "The Palace", The New Yorker, April 2019
• "Being in This World Makes Me Feel Like a Time Traveler", The New York Times, October 2017
• "What Use is Knowing Anything if No One is Around", The New Yorker, June 2017
• "Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats", Poetry, November 2016
• "Portrait of the Alcoholic Floating in Space with Severed Umbilicus", Poetry, October 2016
• "Palmyra", PBS News Hour, December 2015

• The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. Penguin Classics. 2022. ISBN 9780241391587.
• Pilgrim Bell. Graywolf Press. 2021. ISBN 978-1-64445-059-8.
• Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Alice James Books. 2017. ISBN 978-1938584671.
• Portrait of the Alcoholic. Sibling Rivalry Press. 2017. ISBN 978-1943977277.

• Personal Webpage
• Divedapper
• Kaveh Akbar: Profile and Poems at Poets.org