An Evening with Kaveh Akbar and Joseph Earl Thomas: Martyr!

On Saturday, January 27th, 2024, the Midtown Scholar welcomed critically acclaimed poet Kaveh Akbar in Harrisburg for a conversation and signing on his debut novel, 'Martyr!' Akbar was in conversation with award-winning author Joseph Earl Thomas.

Copies of this book are available from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore while supplies last, at https://www.midtownscholar.com/signed...

About the Book:
A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, 'Martyr!' heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was 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—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s 'Martyr!' is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.

About the Author:

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The 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.' He is also the editor of 'The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine.' He lives in Iowa City.

Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from The University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of his memoir, Sink, won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories: Leviathan Beach, among other oddities. He is an associate faculty member at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, as well as the Director of Programs at Blue Stoop in Philadelphia.

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