Kaveh Akbar

His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Best American Poetry, The New Republic, Paris Review, PBS NewsHour, Tin House, and elsewhere. Akbar founded the website Divedapper.com, where he interviews major voices in contemporary American poetry, and he is a member of the collective podcast All Up in Your Ears. On September 1, 2016, Akbar was awarded the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. In 2018, NPR called Akbar "poetry's biggest cheerleader.". With Ocean Vuong, he wrote poems for the 2018 film The Kindergarten Teacher, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal. In 2019, The New Yorker published an online feature around Akbar's long poem "The Palace", and announced that his second full-length poetry collection, Pilgrim Bell, would be published in 2021 by Graywolf Press.

Kaveh Akbar (کاوه اکبر) is an Iranian-American poet and scholar. Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1989. He is the author of Pilgrim Bell, published by Graywolf Press, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, published by Alice James Books in the US and Penguin Books in the UK, and the chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, published by Sibling Rivalry Press. In 2014, he founded the poetry interview website Divedapper. He received his MFA from Butler University, and his PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. He is a faculty member at Purdue University, and on the faculty of the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College. In 2018, he married the American poet Paige Lewis.