Kaveh Akbar is a poet, novelist, editor, and educator whose writing appears in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Best American Poetry, Best American Sportswriting, and elsewhere. Akbar is the author of two full-length poetry collections—Pilgrim Bell (2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (2017)—and the New York Times–bestselling novel Martyr! He edited The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse and co-edited Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance. In 2017, Akbar also authored a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. His work explores sites of collision between faith and addiction with humor and tenderness.
Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran in 1989. He is currently on the English faculty at the University of Iowa and serves as the poetry editor for The Nation, a post previously held by James Baldwin. Akbar is the recipient of prestigious awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.
Martyr! is a 2024 novel by Iranian-American poet and writer Kaveh Akbar, published by Knopf. Set in Iran and the United States, the book follows a young Iranian-American man named Cyrus Shams as well as the constellations of people in his life....
