Daniel Simon

Photo by Alba Simon

Daniel Simon is a poet, translator, and WLT’s assistant director and editor in chief. His latest book, the edited volume Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology, 1867–2017, won a 2018 Nebraska Book Award.

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, “Bowl...
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...
September 2016

Editor’s Note

In a country as big as America it is as impossible to prophesy as it is to generalize, without being tripped up, but it seems to me that there is room for hope as well as mistrust. The epic loses...
May 2016

Editor’s Note

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....
March 2016

Editor’s Pick: The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems by Natalia Toledo

Trans. Clare SullivanPhoneme Media, 2015 In an essay published in the January 2012 issue of World Literature Today, Clare Sullivan notes that poets who write in Zap...
March 2016

Editor’s Note

. . . 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, in...
January 2016

Editor’s Note

To celebrate World Literature Today’s ninetieth year of continuous publication, I’m pleased to announce the 2016 Puterbaugh Essay Series, a yearlong suite of review-essays that survey the tw...
November 2015

Editor’s Note

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 con...
September 2015

Editor’s Note

I noticed he was wearing white summer gloves and knew at once it was for poetry’s stigmata.—Zsuzsa Takács, “Masters Whose Doorsteps” Psalm 51, known to many by its opening lines in...
May 2015

A Tribute to Alene Webb Puterbaugh (1890 –1985)

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 a...
May 2015

Editor’s Note

“In the United States . . . there is the obscure, slow effort of an entire nation to seize universal history and assimilate it as its patrimony.”—Jean-Paul Sartre, “Americans and Their Myths,...
March 2015

Editor’s Note

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 dwind...
January 2015

Editor’s Pick: Second Childhood by Fanny Howe

Graywolf Press, 2014 How much of a poet’s biography can be read into (or behind) a book of poems? In the case of Fanny Howe’s latest collection, Second Childhood, the temptation to project a...