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.
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...
Manuel with Alice / Courtesy of alicewalkersgarden.comIn conjunction with Erik Gleibermann’s interview with Alice Walker that headlines the November issue of World Literature...
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 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...
. . . 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
For the past decade, World Literature Today has been proud to collaborate with Beijing Normal University to bring out an annual Chinese edition of the magazine as well as a biannual journal...
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...
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...
An in-class haiku translation project (2013) / Photo courtesy of Kimiko HahnRecently, the Poetry Society of America announced award-winning poet Kimiko Hahn as its newly elected presid...
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....
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...