Authors

Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.

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  • Persis M. Karim

    Persis M. Karim is Professor of English and comparative literature at San Jose State University in California, where she teaches world literature, comparative literature, and creative writing. She is a contributing poet to the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here anthology and has been involved with the project since 2008.



  • Persis Karim

    Persis Karim is a poet, editor, and professor of comparative and world literature at San Francisco State University, where she also serves as director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. She has been involved with the Al-Mutanabbi Starts Here project since 2007, contributing to the anthology, broadside, and, more recently, to “Shadow and Light” projects. She is the editor of three anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature; her own poetry has appeared in numerous publications including Callaloo, Reed Magazine, Raven’s Perch, New York Times, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, and others.



  • Fowzia Karimi

    Fowzia Karimi is a writer and an illustrator. Her illuminated debut novel, Above Us the Milky Way, was released in 2020. She has illustrated Faust, by Johann Wolfgang van Goethe (translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner); The Brick House, by Micheline Aharonian Marcom; and Vagrants and Uncommon Visitors, by A. Kendra Greene. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.



  • Nilufar Karimi

    Nilufar Karimi is an Iranian American poet and translator. Her works have appeared in West Wind Review and Alchemy Journal of Translation and on behalf of the San Diego Asian Film Festival of the Pacific Arts Movement.



  • Ghada Karmi

    Ghada Karmi is a doctor of medicine, an academic until recently at the University of Exeter, and a political analyst and commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She has written several books, including two memoirs, In Search of Fatima and Return.



  • Photo: Gal Hermonidiv>

    Alit Karp

    Alit Karp is a literary critic for Israel’s daily newspaper, Haaretz. She frequently authors opinion columns on issues related to minority rights and freedom of speech in Israel. Her story “The Princess” appeared in Asymptote in 2016 and was selected by the Guardian (UK) for its Translation Tuesday feature. Her story “Made Flesh” was published in 2017 by World Literature Today. Her book Geese: Travel Impressions from Sweden was published in 2018 by Afik – A Channel for Israeli Literature.



  • Bill Kartalopoulos

    Bill Kartalopoulos is series editor for the Best American Comics series. He also teaches comics history and the graphic novel at Parsons The New School for Design and the School of Visual Arts. He is currently working on a general history of American comics for Princeton University Press.



  • Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

    Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet is a novelist and a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her creative work follows the treacherous path of politics by intruding into people’s personal lives and private spaces. Through her poems and stories, she explores some of the themes of her academic research, including alienation, prejudice, power, love, and violence.


  • Niva Kaspi

    Niva Kaspi is well into her PhD candidacy with the University of Western Australia. Her research is on translations in and of David Grossman’s writing, exploring notions of translatability and the position of translators within the work. She is also a Hebrew-English translator and a lecturer in communication at Edith Cowan College in Perth, where she is involved in projects to enhance language proficiency among students from non-English-speaking backgrounds.



  • Kapka Kassabova

    Kapka Kassabova is a poet and writer. Border (2017) and To the Lake (2020) explore the human geography of the southern Balkans. Border won the British Academy’s Al-Rodhan Prize, the Saltire Book of the Year, the Stanford-Dolman Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Prix européen du livre, and the Angelus Award. 



  • Slađana Kavarić

    Slađana Kavarić is a Montenegrin author. She writes poetry and short stories. To date, she has published two books of poetry: Memory (Sjećanje, 2010) and People from Nowhere (Ljudi niotkuda, 2016). She was born in Podgorica in 1991.



  • Mieko Kawakami

    Mieko Kawakami (b. 1976) is the author of Breasts and Eggs (original title: Natsu monogatari), which was selected for the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books in 2020 and Time’s 10 Best Books in 2020. Her other novels, Heaven and All the Lovers in the Night, are also forthcoming in English. She has received numerous prestigious literary awards in Japan, including the Akutagawa Prize, Tanizaki Prize, and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize. She lives in Tokyo.



  • Hiromi Kawakami

    Hiromi Kawakami (b. 1958, Tokyo) is one of the most popular and respected writers of fiction in Japan, and she is also known as a literary critic and a provocative essayist. Her first novel, Kamisama (God), was published in 1994. In 1996 she was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for Hebi wo fumu (Tread on a snake) and subsequently won the It? Sei Literature Prize, the Woman Writer's Prize, the Tanizaki Prize. In 2007 she was honored by the Ministry of Education for her novel Manazuru, which was subsequently published in Michael Emmerich's translation (Counterpoint, 2010), and her novel The Briefcase, translated by Allison Markin Powell, is forthcoming from Counterpoint in February 2012. (Adapted from Wikipedia)


  • Mihret Kebede

    Mihret Kebede was born in Dessie, Ethiopia. Mihret is the founding director of Netsa Art Village, an artists’ collective, and manager of the Ethio color/Fendika band, and the Tobiya Poetic Jazz event. Mihret is currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her dissertation concerns Silence.



  • Eleni Kefala

    Eleni Kefala has published two books of poetry. She has been a finalist for the Diavazo First-Time Author Award (Greece) and winner of the State Prize for Poetry (Cyprus). She was a juror for the 2022 Neustadt Prize, and she teaches Latin American and comparative literature at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.



  • Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

    Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp is a literary translator—working from Arabic, Russian, and German into English—whose work has been shortlisted for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize, and the GLLI Translated YA Book Prize. She is co-editor of World Kid Lit blog, and she champions world literature for young people in schools and online, especially during #WorldKidLitMonth.


  • Alicia Kennedy

    Alicia Kennedy is a writer from New York based in San Juan. Kennedy writes a weekly newsletter on food culture, politics, and media and is at work on a book about veganism and capitalism that will be published by Beacon Press in 2022.



  • Cate Kennedy

    Cate Kennedy is the award-winning author of novels, poetry, short fiction, and a travel memoir. Her two short-story collections are Dark Roots (2006) and Like a House on Fire (2012), winner of the Queensland Award for best short-story collection and shortlisted for the inaugural Stella Prize. Her story “Cold Snap,” from Dark Roots, was published in the New Yorker as “Black Ice.” The Taste of River Water, Kennedy’s most recent poetry collection, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for poetry in 2012.



  • Photo: © Dan H. Fullerdiv>

    Jesse Lee Kercheval

    Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of fifteen books of poetry and fiction and a translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Recent books include The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia and América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets (reviewed here). She is the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin.



  • Rita Keresztesi

    Rita Keresztesi is a professor in the Department of English as the University of Oklahoma. Her research and teaching focus is on African and African diaspora literary and cultural studies. Dr. Keresztesi was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar at l’Université Ouaga 1 Professeur Ki-Zerbo, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, during the academic year 2010–2011. She has been a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Alumni Ambassador since 2016. She is the author of the book Literary Black Power in the Caribbean: Fiction, Music and Film (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2021); of Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars (University of Nebraska Press, 2005/2009); and the co-editor (with Ellie Higgins and Dayna Oscherwitz) of the book The Western in the Global South (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2015). Her recent publications focus on West African cinema and music and on Afro-Caribbean literature and culture.


  • Etgar Keret

    Israeli author Etgar Keret is known for his television and film work as well as his short stories and children’s book. Several of his stories have been graphically illustrated, and his work has been translated into sixteen different languages. His most recent collection of short stories, The Girl on the Fridge, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April. Keret and his wife, Shira Geffen, codirected Meduzot (Jellyfish), which won the Caméra d’Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as well as two other directorial awards. The movie Wristcutters, now available on DVD, is based on Keret’s story “Kneller’s Happy Campers.” Keret currently resides in Tel Aviv with his wife and son. For more Keret fiction, look for “The Pricking” in our next issue, plus an exclusive interview.



  • Ziad Khadash

    Ziad Khadash was born in Jerusalem and lives in Jalazon Refugee Camp. He is the author of twelve books. He works as a teacher of creative writing in Palestine schools. The recipient of the State Prize, he was shortlisted for the Arab Story Forum Award in Kuwait.



  • Porochista Khakpour

    Porochista Khakpour is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Sick (HarperPerennial, 2017), and the novels The Last Illusion (2014) and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007). Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, Spin, Elle, and many others. She is Writer in Residence at Bard College.



  • Hawre Khalid

    Born in Iraq’s contested city of Kirkuk, Hawre Khalid began his photojournalism career during the early years of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. His photographs have appeared in the New York Times, Time, National Geographic, and Washington Post, among many other publications. His photography has been exhibited worldwide, but Through the Smoke, Behind the Curtain (Kashkul, 2019) was his first solo show in Kurdistan.



  • Taha Khalil

    Taha Khalil is a writer, painter, and intellectual from Syria. Today he hosts a regular television program on Ronahi TV in Qamishlo and is one of the Rojava Centre for Strategic Studies’ three directors.



  • Yousef Khanfar

    An award-winning Palestinian author, Yousef Khanfar has published three books, is featured globally in many publications, and is listed as one of the world’s top photographers. He has received appreciation from the White House, US Supreme Court, the UK’s House of Lords, and beyond. The Fulbright Center for Peace in Washington, DC, selected his book to help celebrate the Global Symposium of Peaceful Nations. He was selected as Artist of the Year to promote literacy with UNICEF, and the Palestine mission to the United Nations honored him for “appreciation of his extraordinary service to promoting peace and justice in Palestine through art.”



  • Photo by Kevin Plattdiv>

    Semyon Khanin

    Semyon Khanin was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1970. He is the author of two collections of poetry in Russian, Tol'ko chto (2003; Just now) and Opushchennye podrobnosti(2008; Missed details). His poetry has been translated into Latvian, English, Czech, German, Italian, Swedish, Estonian, and Ukranian. He is a participant in the literary project Orbita and editor of the almanac by the same name.



  • Oleksandr Khodakivsky

    Oleksandr Khodakivsky is the author of a book of selected poems and essays, Lubvi Molchanie Lobovoe (2019). He lives in Kharkiv.


  • Maya Khosla

    Maya Khosla received the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize for Keel Bone (2003) and awards from Poets & Writers, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her poetry has appeared in Fog and Wood Smoke, Water: Culture, Politics, Management, and various journals, including Poem, Prairie Schooner, and Wisconsin Review. New poems are forthcoming in The Harper Collins Anthology of English Poetry by Indians.



  • Photo by Keiko Onodadiv>

    Shuri Kido

    Shuri Kido has been a leading poet for more than thirty years on the Japanese poetry scene, and his book of poems in English, Names and Rivers, will be published in 2023 by Copper Canyon.