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.

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...
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...
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...