Daniel Simon

Photo by Alba Simon

Daniel Simon is a poet, translator, and WLT’s assistant director and editor in chief. His previous book, the edited volume Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology, 1867–2017, won a 2018 Nebraska Book Award. His most recent edited collection, Dispatches from the Republic of Letters: 50 Years of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, is forthcoming from Deep Vellum’s Phoneme imprint in fall 2020.

Spring 2020

Editor’s Note

We look through the glass to see each other, but from certain angles we catch the glint of our own reflection. – Rachel Ang IF LIT MAGS sketch the “first draft” of litera...
Winter 2020

Aviva-No by Shimon Adaf

Shimon AdafAviva-No Trans. Yael Segalovitz Alice James Books thus I shall not let slip between my hands / a sister into time. – Shimon Adaf I must confess: Shimon Adaf’s Avi...
Winter 2020

Editor’s Note

IN AN ESSAY that appeared in these pages forty-five years ago, Tomás Rivera wrote: “For me the literary experience [of Chicano literature] is one of total communion, an awesome awaren...
Autumn 2019

Editor’s Note

Activism will always be about stories, which I believe save lives. – Emily Rapp Black WHEN THE SELF-PROCLAIMED “Indians of All Nations” occupied Alcatraz Island in November 1...
Summer 2019

Editor’s Note

If one were to drive a nail through this decade, planetary history would swing in the balance. – Kathleen Dean Moore, ISLE, Winter 2014 FIVE YEARS AGO, in the headno...
Spring 2019

Editor’s Note

What to do with the time traveler, the stranger, the alien? – Ladan Osman What do Hong Kong and Niger have in common, apart from being on opposite ends of the UN Human Development Index? (On...
Winter 2019

Editor’s Note

The page is both full of death and free of it. – Edwidge Danticat “And because my mother did not write letters and because I did not ever want to forget the things I wished my mother were tel...
November 2018

Translating Alice Walker: A Conversation with Manuel García Verdecia

Manuel with Alice / Courtesy of alicewalkersgarden.com In conjunction with Erik Gleibermann’s interview with Alice Walker that headlines the November issue of World Literature...
November 2018

Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place

Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place Ed. Annick Smith & Susan O’ConnorMilkweed Editions In many of the essays and poems in this remarkable new collection, the...
November 2018

The WLT Advisory Board

The Student Advisory Board officers for 2018–2019 (clockwise from top): Reid Bartholomew, James Farner, Kayla Ciardi, and Abi Clarke ABOUT A DOZEN YEARS AGO, when World Literature Today firs...
November 2018

Editor’s Note

. . . like a premonition of eternity. – Xavier Bordes M ost writers and—by extension—artists take the brute facts of existence as a starting point, then fashion their work with vary...
September 2018

Editor’s Note

That the ears might hear what the eyes can’t see.– Monchoachi From vinyl collections to mixtapes to digital playlists, music aficionados have always curated their favorites alongside bookshe...
July 2018

Editor’s Note

How does one become a writer? For German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, it was less epiphany than the gradual accretion of circumstance and intention. Here is what she told Haaretz in 2011: “I tu...
May 2018

Editor’s Note

Not only is World Literature Today one of the oldest continuously published magazines devoted to international literature, but a remarkable continuity has prevailed on our masthead page in th...
March 2018

The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, by Edwidge Danticat

The Art of Death Edwidge Danticat Graywolf Press (2017) It might seem odd to focus on a book called The Art of Death as spring approaches (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), but we all know about t...
March 2018

Editor’s Note

Well, Lord, this / infinitesimal speckcould fill the universe with praise. – Marilyn Nelson, “The Dimensions of the Milky Way” W hen Marilyn Nelson delivered her keynote talk, “Bow...
January 2018

Editor’s Note

Thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.– Yehuda Bauer Just this morning, as I began drafting my note for the current i...
November 2017

Editor’s Note

The project advanced by this forum is urgent: individually and collectively to contest the pitched, pervasive, pernicious intolerance of our age. – H. L. Hix, “Belief in an Age of Intolerance...
November 2017

"Starving for Order": A Conversation with Ted Kooser

Harvey Dunn, I Am the Resurrection and the Life, 1926 / Courtesy South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, South Dakota For more, read two new poems by Ted Kooser. While in Lincoln to attend the r...
September 2017

Editor’s Note

Every story had a face, a first and last name, a mother or son, brother or sister, losses and days of triumph.– Leonora Flis, “Zeroes” The haunting photograph on the cover of this issue, by...
May 2017

Daniel Simon’s Summer Reads

Editor in Chief Daniel Simon picks three books that promise to unsettle, console, and inspire. Anne Carson Float Random House I fo...
May 2017

Editor’s Note

In the spring 1992 issue of World Literature Today, published to mark the quincentenary of Cristoforo Colombo’s encounter with the New World, Robert Berner writes: “The fact of the matter is...
March 2017

The Flavor of Unity: Post-Election Poems, by Kim Stafford

Kim Stafford The Flavor of Unity: Post-Election Poems Little Infinities, 2017 Are you dreading the future after reading all the dystopian lit in this issue, or feeling paralyzed by the ge...
March 2017

Editor’s Note

How could utopia fail? – Elizabeth Fifer, “Dead Reckoning” In László Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel, The Melancholy of Resistance—published the same year Hungarian communism collapsed a...
January 2017

Editor’s Note

Language written in the aftermath of extremity [arises] not from recollection in tranquility but from wanderings in a debris field. – Carolyn Forché, “An Inexhaustible Responsibility...