Prairie Lights

Kaveh Akbar will read from his edited anthology,  The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse:110 Poets on the Divine. He will be joined in conversation by IWP Director and poet, Christopher Merrill.

This rich and surprising anthology is a holistic, global survey of a lyric conversation about the divine. These works range from The Epic of Gilgamesh through canonical figures like Blake, Dickinson and Tagore, alongside lesser-anthologized, diverse poets going up to the present day. Together they show the breathtaking multiplicity of ways humanity has responded to the spiritual, across place and time.
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic.  His first novel, Martyr, is forthcoming in 2024. He teaches at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City.