Kaveh Akbar

Director of the English and Creative Writing Major
Professor
Biography

Office Hours

TBD for Fall 2025 

Get to know Kaveh

Kaveh Akbar is the New York Times bestselling author of the novel Martyr!—a finalist for the National Book Award and one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year—and two books of poetry: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf. He is also the author of a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine and, with Paige Lewis, co-editor of Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance

Kaveh is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, and elsewhere, and has been awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, multiple Pushcart Prizes, and many others. In 2025, the University of Iowa named him their Scholar of the Year. 

Kaveh’s work appears in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Paris Review, New Republic, GQ, The Atlantic, Best American Poetry, Best American Sports Writing, and elsewhere. He was the founding editor of Divedapper, and since 2020, has served as poetry editor for The Nation. Born in Tehran, Iran, Kaveh lives in Iowa. His writing has been translated into over thirty languages.