Observable Readings: Donika Kelly & Kaveh Akbar

The reading will be held in-person at High Low, and also streamed live to this event page and to Saint Louis Poetry Center’s Facebook page. Please note the livestream can only be viewed the night of the event.

Akbar Photo Credit: Marlon James

Observable Readings and COVID-19

The health, safety, and well-being of our audiences, visiting poets, SLPC staff & volunteers, and the St. Louis community is our top priority. Patrons attending Observable Readings in-person are required to provide upon entrance to High Low:

• A photo ID, AND;
• A vaccination card with name that indicates full vaccination, OR 
• A photo of a complete vaccination card with name, OR 
• A negative RT-PCR test taken within 72 hours of the event date, OR 
• A negative antigen test taken within 24 hours of the event date

Donika Kelly

Donika Kelly is the author The Renunciations and Bestiary. Bestiary is the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, Donika has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Foglifter. She currently lives in Iowa City and is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.

Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017; Penguin UK, 2018). He is also the author of a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry, 2017). Kaveh is the recipient of the Levis Reading Prize, Pushcart Prize, Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Kaveh is the founding editor of Divedapper, a home for interviews with major voices in contemporary poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he writes a weekly column for the Paris Review called “Poetry RX.” Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. His poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, PBS NewsHour, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His newest work, Pilgrim Bell, was released in August 2021 (Graywolf).