Kaveh Akbar

Director of the English and Creative Writing Major
Associate Professor
Biography

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 a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry, 2017), and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine.

Kaveh is the recipient of the Levis Reading Prize, multiple Pushcart Prizes, Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and 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. His poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, PBS NewsHour, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere.

Since 2020, Kaveh has served as poetry editor for The Nation.