Events Calendar

Fee: Registration: Register online at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/kaveh-akbar-author-of-martyr-an-in-person-boswell-event-tickets-773329006877
This event takes place at Boswell Book Company, 2559 North Downer Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53211.
To order a copy of the book: https://www.boswellbooks.com/opening-letter-0

HOME joins Boswell Book Company in hosting Kaveh Akbar, an award-winning poet and now author of the stunning debut novel Martyr!, an electrifying, funny, and wholly original book about faith, addiction, art, life, and death. He will be joined in conversation by artist and 2024 Nohl Fellow Nina Ghanbarzadeh.

In Akbar’s first novel, the newly sober, orphaned son of an Iranian immigrant grapples with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s death in a plane shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf, and his father’s life in America, one circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past, including an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death and his mother, who may not have been who or what she seemed.

From Pulitzer-finalist Tommy Orange: "I haven’t loved a book this much in years. Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever."

Kaveh Akbar is author of two poetry collections, Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. His poems appear in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and The Paris Review.