One of Kaveh Akbar’s first pieces of writing was a “chapter book” he wrote and illustrated when he was in kindergarten, about a boy named T.J. and his pet dinosaur, Rex. 

Akbar’s family moved to America from Iran when he was young, and he learned to speak and write English concurrently. The stories and poems began to take shape soon after. 

“In high school, I realized that being a writer was a thing you were allowed to do, specifically being a poet was just a thing that people still were, and that’s how they made their way through the world,” Akbar says. “I was like, ‘All right, that’s what I’ll be, then. Problem solved.’ I’ve never really wavered from that clarity.”

Akbar, associate professor and director of the English and Creative Writing major at the University of Iowa, first drew acclaim for his poetry, including the chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (2017), and his full-length collections, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (2017) and Pilgrim Bell (2021).

He and his spouse, Paige Lewis — also a poet and assistant professor in the UI Department of English — came to Iowa in the summer of 2022. Before coming to the University of Iowa, which Akbar notes “every writer in the world knows about,” the couple met in the PhD program at Florida State University and taught at Purdue University. 

When his debut novel, Martyr!, hit shelves in January 2024, it launched Akbar to new heights: the New York Times bestseller and Top 10 Books of 2024 lists and shortlisted, then a finalist, for the National Book Award for Fiction. 

One of the country’s most acclaimed authors, Akbar talks about his passion for teaching, his writing process, and Iowa City’s literary community. 

What was it like going from writing poetry to writing fiction with Martyr!?

There is a lot of poetry in Martyr!, and I still write poems. A lot of the poems that I write today are just one-off little poems about our dog that I leave sitting around the house, and my spouse finds them and says, “This is very nice. Now, go take out the garbage,” or “Do the dishes.” 

Writing is how I make sense of the world. Writing is also one of my favorite things to do. I just like the way it feels to write. I like the way it feels to have written. 

It started to be the case that my writing was taking prose-ier shapes and thus began to organize itself into a novel, and that’s what came out last year. But I don’t know that I am done with poetry; neither do I know that I’m done with fiction. 

It sounds maybe pretentious, but I think of myself as a language artist in that language is my medium, the way that a painter uses paint, and a statuary artist might use marble. I came up thinking a lot about poetry, but I’m thrilled at the possibility that that’s not the only shape that the language might take. 

What does your writing process look like?

The Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert talked about how there are cat writers and there are ox writers. The ox writer is dutifully pulling the plow every day, no matter how hard the soil, no matter how rusty the plow. The cat writer patrols the house, takes surveillance out the window, and then a mote of dust catches the light, and they pounce on it, and that’s the inspiration. 

I’m very much an ox writer, which means that I can’t be too precious about where I’m writing, when I’m writing. I just need to write as often as I can or else my brain starts to get a little hairy. I can write on napkins at a restaurant while I’m waiting for the dinner rolls to come out. 

Did you expect the success of Martyr! when you were writing it?

When I was writing Martyr!, I was trading pages with the writer Tommy Orange every Friday. We would send each other 10 pages and little notes on the last week’s pages. When I was writing, so often it was just trying to impress Tommy, who’s one of my favorite writers. Ensuring that it cohered enough that Tommy would be able to understand it was the extent to which I was imagining a world outside reading it. I write a lot and publish very little. For a long time, I didn’t even conceive of it necessarily as something that would be public facing. It was just writing that I was doing with my friend. 

As a poet, you’re pretty content with a relatively small portion of the American consciousness. I always think about how the five most famous poets in America could get on the train and probably 98% of the people on the train wouldn’t recognize them. One grows accustomed to that, and one grows accustomed to a life spent in the quiet and humble pursuit of the thing that they love best. That’s how I came up. 

The audience for fiction is quite a bit larger than the audience for literary poetry in America, at least for books of it. That sense of scale was a little dizzying at first, just thinking about airports having my book. My older niece just sent me a picture of herself in a Barnes & Noble next to a table full of my book. That’s a pretty cool and extraordinary and special feeling. The conceit of someone reading my very specific novel that feels very much like I just tipped my head over and poured my brain out into novel form feels bewildering and an occasion for a lot of gratitude. 

What do you hope people take away from reading Martyr!?

I hope that if they take something away, it’s a measure of amongness. It’s a measure of possibility that people and the feelings that seem interminable within them are, in fact, precedented, and other people have lived them and lived to make art about them through them. 

When I was a kid, I always used to be amazed at how when I was sad, I wanted to listen to sad music instead of happy music. You think that if you’re sad, you would want to listen to Weird Al or something like this to bring yourself out of the sadness. But, in fact, I always wanted to listen to The Smiths or Elliott Smith or something really sad. I realized only in adulthood that impulse is not some inherently masochistic streak native to my own psychopathology but is instead a desire to hear other people say, “I, too, have been sad, and I live to sing about it.” I hope that there is, in Martyr!, a measure of that amongness available to readers. 

What did you get out of writing Martyr!?

It’s an extraordinary thing to have written. It’s an extraordinary thing to have made that which would have never existed had it not been there for you making it. Other people can make other art, but no one ever would have made this book had it not been for my spending five to seven years wringing it out of the ether and then sculpting it endlessly. 

That makes me a little less afraid to die, like at least I will have made this thing, and nothing I can do can take that away from me. Nothing anyone can do can take that away, but especially nothing I can do can take that away. I made this thing. This thing exists, and it will continue existing no matter what I do now. That’s really, really cool and affirming to me. 

What are some of your favorite books?

If you ask me what my favorite books are seven days a week, I’ll give you 12 different answers. 

Important for Martyr! was Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars, which is sort of the sister book to Martyr!, because as I was writing Martyr!, he was writing Wandering Stars. No book influenced Martyr! more than that. 

I also love Amos Tutuola’s Palm Wine Drinkard. 

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is really important to me in how I think about narrative and poetry and rhythm accruing meaning. 

What do you love most about working with Iowa’s undergraduate writers?

My first degree was in English education. I taught middle school for a happy period of my life. I did my student teaching in a high school. I substitute taught for a time, and I love teaching.

I love how molten the minds of undergraduates are, how permeable they are to bewilderment, and wonder, and baffle, and just being utterly, earnestly, unironically blown away by new experience. Which is not to say that graduate students aren’t also permeable in those ways, but it really feels like undergraduates have a special plasticity to their thinking about the world, to their openness to revelatory experience that makes it genuinely a privilege to learn alongside them in the classroom every day. 

What do you hope students take away from their time at Iowa?

I hope they take with them new loved ones they’ve met on the page, that they met in their classrooms, that they met during office hours, that they met at readings. I hope that they take away a community of minds that will illuminate and complicate their own and make being alive amidst all the amidst seem more tenable. I hope they take an ability to speak about what animates and moves them. I hope they take a fluency with communication, a fluency with the English language, a healthy skepticism of certainty, and an ability to think critically about what they’re being told. 

Why did you come to Iowa, and what do you love most about the Iowa City community?

Every writer in the world knows about the University of Iowa, and we moved here after hearing about a job opening in 2022. Big Ten universities are very much my jam. I like public institutions, and I like the Midwest. 

Iowa City is unique among any city I’ve ever been to in America or abroad for the density of literary talent that exists here. You have the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. You have this extraordinary undergraduate creative writing major. You have the Spanish MFA. You have the Nonfiction Writing Program. You have the Center for the Book. You have the International Writing Program. You have all of these disparate zones of extraordinary writing happening. You also have Prairie Lights, one of the greatest independent bookstores in the country. It creates this community where there’s an extraordinary reading every night, and everyone you see just walking to the grocery store is this extraordinarily talented writer or someone who can talk about writing. I’ve just never been anywhere like that. 

It extends to our students, the students who want to be here. The students who find themselves here tend to be people who really, really value what I value, which is art. That’s a reason to stay alive. It’s one of the great privileges of my life to be able to humbly and gratefully serve the thing that I love best, which is writing, and Iowa City is the best place I’ve found in the world to do that.