FARMINGTON — The University of Maine at Farmington will host poet Kaveh Akbar as the next reader in its Visiting Writers Series. Sponsored by the UMF Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, the reading will take place at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 30, in the Landing in the UMF Olsen Student Center.

The reading is free and open to the public, to be followed by a meet-and-greet with the author.

In addition to the reading, Akbar will lead a workshop, titled “Mining the Poetic,” from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Thursday at Alice James Books, located on the UMF campus at 114 Prescott St.

There are limited seats available; contact Alicia Hynes at alicejamesea@alicejamesbooks.org to sign up.

Akbar’s poems will or have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times, The Nation, Tin House, The Guardian, Ploughshares, FIELD, Georgia Review, PBS NewsHour, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Narrative, The Poetry Review, AGNI, New England Review, A Public Space, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry International, Best New Poets 2016, Guernica, Boston Review and elsewhere.

His debut full-length collection, “Calling a Wolf a Wolf,” is just out with Alice James in the U.S. and Penguin in the UK, and his chapbook, “Portrait of the Alcoholic,” was published by Sibling Rivalry Press.

The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida.

Kaveh Akbar

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