Kaveh Akbar is the author of the novel Martyr! 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. Born in Tehran, Iran, Kaveh teaches at the University of Iowa. His writing appears in the New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Since 2020, Kaveh has served as poetry editor for The Nation.
Genres: Literary Fiction
Books containing stories by Kaveh Akbar
Award nominations
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Kaveh Akbar recommends
The Original Daughter (2025)
Jemimah Wei
"Jemimah Wei's debut The Original Daughter goes for all the big stuff: ambition, time, family, forgiveness, constructing the self. Thrilling, to find a new author with an appetite for the whole spectrum of living, and the skill to get it down true. A contract of sisterhood is signed, then life, then ambition, then disappointment and heartbreak and and and. Wei's prose is delicious, propulsively hurdling us through the lives of Gen and Arin, who will live in my marrow forever. The Original Daughter is so much the real deal."
The Antidote (2025)
Karen Russell
"In The Antidote, Karen Russell writes indelible characters who keep choosing messy community over silo'd righteousness, motion over despair. She presents for inspection America's most persistent chorus of moral self-defense, 'Better them than us,' and shows how it rots the minds, hearts, and land of all who sing it. Only Karen Russell could write a dust bowl opus with such raucous brio - The Antidote soars with exigent joy and laugh-out-loud scenes, with memory witches and enchanted cameras and the world's most lovable sentient scarecrow. It's magic, a book doing this big work and also making it propulsive, eminently readable. If irony bypasses the difficulty of describing things, then the vivid sincerity on display here marks a virtuosic artist at the height of her lucidity. Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude."
Our Long Marvelous Dying (2024)
Anna DeForest
"Anna DeForest's Our Long Marvelous Dying gives us a novelist fully in command of their instrument, staring searchingly at death without the dubious veils of euphemism or willed obliviousness. We see dying in the macro - a young doctor navigating a global death event exacerbated by myriad social and political pathologies - set against more quotidian deaths: passion crumbling within a relationship, personal agency eroding as a child is unexpectedly taken in. But what elevates Our Long Marvelous Dying into the realm of the rapturously readable is DeForest's uncanny gift for lyric language. One can almost pick out voices - Patacara, Lorca, Durkheim, Kahlo - with whom Our Long Marvelous Dying speaks. A true artist brings an impossible thing into utter clarity; with this novel, DeForest enters with singular vision into a species-old conversation about what happens - to the dead and to the living - when we die."
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