Kaveh Bassiri is an Iranian-American writer and translator, who was born in Tehran and came to United States as a teenager. He is the author of two chapbooks, 99 Names of Exile (2019), winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and Elementary English (2020), winner of Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. Bassiri is the recipient of a 2022-2023 Tulsa Artist Fellowship, 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council, 2020 Artist 360 Grant sponsored by the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and the Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Award. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in a number of anthologies and textbooks, including Best American Poetry 2020, Best New Poets 2020, The Heart of a Stranger (2020), Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (2021), Somewhere We Are Human (2022), A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers (2022), and Without a Doubt (2023). They can also be found in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Virginia Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, Nimrod International Journal, The Cincinnati Review, and Shenandoah.

As a translator, Bassiri has won the Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency and a 2019 translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His translations have appeared in the Chicago Review, The Common, Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Two Lines, Guernica, World Literature Today, and Colorado Review. Recently, he worked on the English subtitles of movies by (and interviews with) Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami and Bahram Beyzai for the Criterion Collection. He was also a judging panelist for the 2020 NEA translation fellowship.

Bassiri has an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Arkansas. At the University of Arkansas, he received the Sturgis International Fellowship, the Walton Fellowship in Translation, and the Lily Peter Award for Poetry. He also taught a range of Persian literature and film courses, including honors seminars on the Iranian novel and Muslim mystical literature. His research and fieldwork in Iran have primarily explored contemporary poetry, film, and theater. His essays have been published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Iranian Studies, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, the Global Encyclopedia of LGBTQ History, Film International, and Senses of Cinema. Between 2013 and 2018, he was a regular contributor to the Michigan Quarterly Review (MQR) Online. For 2022-2023, he teaches creative writing at University of Tulsa and is a public fellow at the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities.

Bassiri has also worked as an editor and as a curator of reading series. He was the editor of Sarah Lawrence College’s graduate literary journal Lumina and the poetry editor for the online journal /One/. Currently, he is a contributing editor to Copper Nickel and the translation editor for the cross-cultural, multilingual, experimental publisher Pamenar Press. He co-curated a number of reading series that brought together emerging and established writers, including the Reading Between A & B and Triptych Readings in New York City and Improved Lighting in Fayetteville, Arkansas. From 2007 to 2012, he was the literary arts director of the Persian Arts Festival, which ran regular readings of Persian as well as Iranian-American poetry and prose at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.

Over the last decade, Bassiri has presented at the annual conferences of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the Association for Iranian Studies (AIS), the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), NYU’s Summer Intensive Writers Workshop, and Nimrod’s Conference for Readers and Writers. He has also read his poetry and translation at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the Split This Rock Poetry Festival, the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Grinnell College, Pratt Institute, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Chicago, the Ozark Small-Press Poetry Festival, the So and So Series, the Open Mouth Poetry Festival, the Bryant Park Reading Room Series, Traveling Molly's, and the Lyrics and Dirges Reading Series.