Daniel Simon is a poet, essayist, 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, was published by Deep Vellum’s Phoneme imprint in 2020 and was nominated for a 2020 Foreword INDIES Award.
when they bombed other people’s houses, we // protested /
but not enough, we opposed them but not // enough.
– Ilya Kaminsky, “We Lived Happily During the War”...
a dark angel flies with a shofar
playing his trumpet in flight
– Boris Khersonsky
HOW IS IT possible to think about art during a time of war? Years before the Russian milit...
I think there is something transformative about living through, liberating yourself and evolving past your brutish histories.
– Saba Sebhatu, “Final Landing”
PRIOR TO GOING ...
WHAT DOES A Babylonian epic—which dates to the twenty-first century bce in its earliest preserved versions—have to say to readers of world literature in the twenty-first century ce, s...
Say eros in translation, say I want to be translated by you. – Sawako Nakayasu, Say Translation Is ArtARABIC, CHINESE, FRENCH, Hebrew, Ikyaushi, Italian, Japanese,...
You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit. – Edward W. Said, “The Myth of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’”
IN ITS...
Spectators heading toward Greenwood on June 1, 1921 / Courtesy of the University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library
Just published by the University of Oklahoma Press, The 1921 Tulsa Race Mas...
We were never meant to survive.
– Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival” (1978)
Amid the destruction of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre—the white assault on the city’s Greenwood District that claimed as m...
Theodore Ziolkowski in 1992 / Photo by Robert Matthews, Princeton University
Our strolls through the cemeteries of Berlin, then, are no more funereal and depressing than, say, the performa...
IT COULD BE ARGUED that World Literature Today (still) exists because of the Neustadt Prize, not the other way around. In the mid-1960s, some University of...
Hope is the work that we must do, so much work to fix this. – Eïrïc R. Durändal-Stormcrow, “Don’t Suicide”
In his poem “Impromptu,” written while walking along the Piedras River watershed, Pu...
This week marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. Karlos K. Hill’s new book, The Murder of Emmett Till, retells and recontextualizes the story...
Lauren Camp
Took House
Tupelo Press
I will speak of this wind . . . of the seams of desire.
—Lauren Camp,
“Remember It Was”
The Greek mythological term omophagia...
We’ll want to know what happened, and why—not just the factual whys . . . but the why of the human psyche. – Rilla Askew, “Cataclysm”
ON THE COVER of this issue: sixteen empt...
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...
Shimon Adaf
Aviva-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...
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...
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...
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...
Garden mural from the triclinium of Livia, ca. 30–20 BC, Palazzo Massimo, Rome / Photo by Ian Scott / Flickr
With the recent publication of her latest verse collection, This Bright Da...
The Youth Strike for Climate Protest, London, March 15, 2019 / Photo: David Holt / Flickr
Looking ahead to our summer 2019 issue, with its cover focus devoted to “The Global Literature of Clim...
To kick off National Poetry Month, I’d like to share with you five favorite poets/poems that have appeared in the magazine’s pages over the past five years.
Zsuzsa Takács (Hungary), “On Vision” and “...
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...
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...
Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe / Photo by Phillip Kalantzis Cope / Flickr
In the wake of the October 27 mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the U...