Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017; Penguin UK, 2018). He is also the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry, 2017) and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine (2022). Akbar has received numerous honors, including the Levis Reading Prize, the 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. He is the founding editor of Divedapper, a home for interviews with major voices in contemporary poetry. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College. His poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, PBS NewsHour, the Paris Review, Best American Poetry, the New York Times, and elsewhere. Since 2020, Akbar has served as poetry editor for The Nation.