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 g...

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 for the...

To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck....

. . . we sleep in the tents of the prophets . . . sing so that distance may forget us. . . . Ours is a country of words. – Mahmoud Darwish, “We Travel Like All People,” trans. Fady Joudah, i...

Some days light is the color of all / my losses.—Lauren Camp, “Alma’s Stripes” Do poems have dimensions? We know they occupy space on the page, but can we measure verse the way we measure co...

Alene Puterbaugh. Painting by Ed Kelley. In March 1972, in response to a letter from University of Oklahoma president Paul F. Sharp addressed to her late husband, Alene Puterbaugh wrote: “I wish to...

In a recent op-ed for Mother Jones, Ted Genoways laments the declining cultural influence of university-sponsored literary magazines, many of which have been faced with dwin...

Literature and storytelling confirm us as relatives and neighbors in our infinite diversity. — Mia Couto, “Re-enchanting the World” In her nominating statement for the 2014 Neustadt Interna...

From our vantage point here on the Oklahoma plains, we’re constantly reminded that we live in “Native America” (every time we look at the license plate of a car in front of us), but few probably rea...

When I first met Maaza Mengiste in May 2012 at a French Roast café in Manhattan’s West Village, I was in New York to attend the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. I had just gotte...

It is as if the world broke off. Why did it break off? Because the myth ended. – Anne Carson, preface to Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides For those who subs...