Poetry off the Shelf: Kaveh Akbar & Charif Shanahan

Kaveh Akbar founded and edits Divedapper, where he interviews major voices in contemporary poetry. He is the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (2017) and the new collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf. He was born in Tehran, Iran, and is teaching at Purdue University this fall. In 2016, Akbar received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (2017), which won the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, he is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.