Iranian-American Kaveh Akbar (1989) was born in Tehran, Iran and moved to America when he was two, where he now teaches at the University of Iowa. He has previously published the poetry collections Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, as well as the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic. His poems have appeared in The New York Times and Paris Review. During Crossing Border, Akbar will talk at Crossing Border about his debut novel Martyr!.

Cyrus lives in a small room in a shared apartment with a pile of dirty laundry and overdue library books as his only possessions. In the idle hours since giving up booze, he spends most of his time thinking about writing and not doing so, meditating on the deeper meaning of his Iranian background. What he really wants is to die. To achieve the ultimate martyrdom. That's in Iranian nature, he argues. Wandering through life, he hears about the Iranian artist Orkideh who puts on a performance at the Brooklyn Museum in New York: Death-Speak. She spends her last weeks and days at the museum as she dies of cancer and engages in conversations with visitors. This is what he needs. He takes the plane to New York, but the conversations he has with Orkideh bring him not closer to death, but to life.