Tommy Orange
MacArthur Fellow, bestselling novelist and author of There There and Wandering Stars
Kaveh Akbar
Poet and author of the National Book Award-nominated novel Martyr!
“ Reading is a conversation with other creatives.”
Photo credit: Beowolf Sheehan
Kaveh Akbar is a poet and writer known for exploring spirituality, addiction, and identity. An award-winning poet and Poetry Editor at The Nation, Akbar’s New York Times-bestselling debut novel, Martyr! follows a newly sober son of Iranian immigrants on a quest for family secrets. In his riveting talks, Akbar speaks with humor, lyricism, and candor about literature, cultural history, and the writing process.
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About Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar is an acclaimed poet, novelist, and editor whose work grapples with questions of faith, addiction, belonging, and the search for meaning. His highly anticipated debut novel, Martyr!, became an instant New York Times bestseller and was named a TIME Must-Read Book of the Year. Praised by literary luminaries including Tommy Orange, Lauren Groff, John Green, and Roxane Gay, Martyr! tells the story of Cyrus Shams, a newly sober son of Iranian immigrants navigating addiction, grief, and a family mystery that carries him from the battlefields of Iran to the art galleries of Brooklyn. Electrifying, funny, and deeply humane, the novel heralds the arrival of a vital new voice in contemporary fiction.
In his talks, Akbar brings the same searching intelligence, vulnerability, and lyric precision that define his writing. He speaks powerfully on the subjects of creativity, spirituality, identity, and recovery, weaving together personal narrative with broader cultural and historical context. His lectures and conversations offer audiences profound reflections on art as a tool for survival, how language shapes belonging, and the universal human desire for transcendence.
Kaveh Akbar is the author of the award-winning poetry collections Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, as well as the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic. His poems, celebrated for their intensity and candor, have won multiple Pushcart Prizes and been recognized by NPR and Best American Poetry. Akbar is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine, a wide-ranging anthology that illuminates how poets across centuries and traditions have wrestled with the sacred. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. He was the founding editor of Divedapper and has served as poetry editor for The Nation since 2020.
Born in Tehran and raised in the Midwest, Akbar is the Roy J. Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.
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Praise for Kaveh Akbar
Praise for Martyr!
The best novel you’ll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness.
— Lauren Groff, best-selling author of Matrix and Fates and FuriesIncandescent . . . Akbar has created an indelible protagonist, haunted, searching, utterly magnetic. But it speaks to Akbar’s storytelling gifts that Martyr! is both a riveting character study and piercing family saga . . . Akbar is a dazzling writer, with bars like you wouldn’t believe . . . What Akbar pulls off in Martyr! is nothing short of miraculous.
— The New York Times Book ReviewBrilliant . . . steeped in humor and absurdity but deathly serious as well . . . The strength of Martyr! is that Akbar arranges its various messes well and doesn’t strive too hard to reconcile them.
— Los Angeles TimesMartyr! is almost violently artful, full of sentences that stab, pierce, and slice with their beauty . . . Reading this prose can feel like watching an Olympic athlete perform household tasks: Akbar’s writing has the musculature of poetry that can’t rely on narrative propulsion and so propels itself. It’s tonally nuanced—in command of a dazzling spectrum of frequencies from comedic to tragic—rigorous, and surprising.
— The New Yorker -
Books by Kaveh Akbar
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Featured Title
Martyr!
“Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever.” —Tommy Orange, Pulitzer Prize–nominated author of There There
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