The Poets: Joel Peckham and Darius Atefat-Peckham

DARIUS ATEFAT-PECKHAM is an Iranian-American poet and essayist. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, The Journal, Rattle and elsewhere. He’s also been included in many anthologies, including My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press). In 2018, he was selected by the Library of Congress as a National Student Poet, and traveled the Midwest in this capacity to teach Middle school and High school-aged students about the concurrence of grief and joy in literature. Atefat-Peckham is the author of the chapbook How Many Love Poems, (Seven Kitchens Press) and editor of his mother’s, Susan Atefat-Peckham’s, posthumous collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us (CavanKerry Press, 2023). He grew up in Huntington, West Virginia, attended Interlochen Arts Academy, and received his Bachelor of Arts in English and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard. He’s currently a Poetry Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.

JOEL PECKHAM is a poet, essayist, and scholar. He has published eleven collections of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Any Moonwalker Can Tell You: New and Selected Poems, (SFAU), Gone The Sun (UnCollected Press), Body Memory (New Rivers), and the spoken word LP, Still Running: Words and Music by Joel Peckham (EAT poems). His new and selected poems, Any Moonwalker Can Tell You is forthcoming from SFAU in the late spring of 2024. With Robert Vivian, he also co-edited the anthology, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose. He lives in Huntington and is a professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at Marshall University