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.

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...
January 2015

Editor’s Note

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 Internat...
November 2014

Editor’s Note

[After 1989], I felt as though I had crawled out from under the debris of a mass collision of historical proportions, slightly scraped, yet a new man. – Durs Grünbein, “The Vocation...
September 2014

Editor’s Note

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 real...
May-August 2014

Editor’s Note

[Borges’s] Argentinians act out Parisian dramas, his Central European Jews are wise in the ways of the Amazon, his Babylonians are fluent in the paradigms of Babel. – Anthony Kerrig...
March 2014

Editor’s Note

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 gotten...
January 2014

Editor’s Pick: The Dailiness by Lauren Camp

While working on the “Classics Rekindled” section that appears in this issue (page 35), I was struck by the following words from Anne Carson: “Every time a poet writes a poem he is asking the...
January 2014

Editor’s Note

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 subsc...
November 2013

Editor’s Note

Five years on from the Great Recession, WLT is proud to present an international sampling of working-class literature, guest-edited by Jeanetta Calhoun...
September 2013

Three Questions for Abdellah Taïa

Daniel Simon The themes of “Turning Thirty” have an archetypal feel to them—sickness, death, rebirth, forbidden love, truth, happiness, naming, freedom, madness, fear, solitude. Do y...
September 2013

Editor’s Note

When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction? – Adrienne Rich, “Inscriptions,” 1991–95 In an essay on “The Homoerotics of Travel,” Ruth Vanita proposes mobility as a def...
July 2013

Editor’s Note

In an essay first published in these pages eighty years ago, Albert L. Guérard wonders whether there is an “intimate and inevitable connection between nationality and literature” (April 1933). While...
May 2013

Editor’s Note

All the world’s a stage. – Shakespeare When I went to Boston in March to attend, for the first time, the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference, everything abo...
March 2013

Editor’s Note, March 2013

“It’s been said of Picasso that he studies an object like a surgeon dissects a corpse. We want no more of these embarrassing corpses, these objects. Light i...
January 2013

Editor’s Pick: In Beauty Bright by Gerald Stern

In Beauty Bright, Gerald Stern, W. W. Norton, 2012 In “Four Crises,” an essay in his 2012 collection Stealing History, Gerald Stern writes: “Humans, because of their minds, because o...