April 15, 2024
December 12, 2023
Authors
Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.
Alexandra McManus
Alexandra McManus is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Oklahoma studying communications with minors in editing and publishing as well as sociology. She has served as a nonfiction editor for the Tulsa Review and as a culture reporter for the OU Daily.
Dan Taulapapa McMullin
Dan Taulapapa McMullin is an artist and poet from American Samoa. His recent book of poems, Coconut Milk (University of Arizona Press, 2013), was on the American Library Association’s Rainbow List Top Ten Books of the Year. His current projects include Aue Away, an art installation commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and 100 Tikis, an art appropriation video addressing the intersection of tiki kitsch and indigenous sovereignty.
Kat Meads
A North Carolina native, Kat Meads is the author of six novels (one written as Z. K. Burrus), three essay collections, two short fiction collections, an epistolary memoir, and a hybrid fiction. She has also published several chapbooks of poetry and prose. Her short plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Toronto (Canada), and elsewhere. Her writing has been recognized by two Independent Publisher (IPPY) medals, an NEA fellowship, a California Artist fellowship, and two Silicon Valley artist grants. A five-time Foreword Reviews Book of the Year finalist, she has received five Best American Essays notable citations and writer residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, Millay, Blue Mountain Center, and Montalvo Center for the Arts. She lives in California.
Photo by Paul O’Maradiv>Sandra Meek
The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, and three Georgia Author of the Year awards, Sandra Meek has published six books of poems, including Still (Persea, 2020), An Ecology of Elsewhere, Road Scatter, and the Dorset Prize–winning Biogeography.
Gabriela Melinescu
Gabriela Melinescu (b. 1942) is an essayist, writer, poet, and translator. She published seven poetry collections in Romania and continued writing after she emigrated to Sweden in 1975, where she was the recipient of several literary prizes. She was in a relationship with the celebrated Romanian poet Nichita Stănescu and inspired many of his poems.
João Cabral de Melo Neto
João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999) was a Brazilian poet and diplomat. After moving to Rio de Janeiro in 1942, he published his first collection of poems, entitled Pedra do Sono. In 1947 he was assigned to his first diplomatic post in Spain, where he continued to write. Most of Cabral's life was spent as a diplomat, which afforded him the opportunity to travel the world. Through all of his travels, he continued to write poetry, and at the end of his life, he had published over fifteen collections. He is considered one of the greatest Brazilian poets of all time.
Photo by Jonah M. Kessel/WSJdiv>G. Mend-Ooyo
Gombojavin Mend-Ooyo was born in Dariganga Province, Mongolia, in 1952. A poet, novelist, calligrapher, and cultural scholar, he is the director of the Mongolian Academy of Culture and Poetry in Ulaanbaatar.
Norge Espinosa Mendoza
Poet, playwright, and cultural critic Norge Espinosa Mendoza (b. 1971, Santa Clara) is widely considered one of Cuba’s most important LGBTQ activists. His plays have premiered in Cuba, Puerto Rico, France, and the United States.
Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III
Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III is the author of the novel Aklat ng mga Naiwan (2018), co-editor and co-translator of Wiji Thukul’s Balada ng Bala, translator of Mga Himutok sa Palikuran (2021), the Filipino-language edition of Eka Kurniawan’s collection of stories, and co-editor of Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines.
Filippo Menozzi
Filippo Menozzi is a lecturer in postcolonial and world literature at Liverpool John Moores University and author of two books, Postcolonial Custodianship: Cultural and Literary Inheritance (2014) and World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time (2020).
Antonio Alessandro Mercadante
Antonio Alessandro Mercadante (1962–2018) was an Italian art historian and critic specializing in twentieth-century Italian painting. His essays appeared in art catalogs by renowned Italian art publishers. In 2009 he began a collaboration with publisher Lussografica of Caltanissetta and produced five books of art history fundamental to the reconstruction of Sicilian art from the 1800s to the present.
Henri Meschonnic
Henri Meschonnic (1932–2009) is a key figure of French “new poetics,” best known worldwide for his translations from the Old Testament and the 710-page Critique du rythme. During his long career, Meschonnic generated controversy in the literary community. His poetry has received prestigious awards, including the Max Jacob International Poetry Prize, the Mallarmé Prize, the Jean Arp Francophone Literature Prize, and the Guillevic-Ville de Saint-Malo Grand Prize for Poetry. He was also nominated for the 1992 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Maggie Messitt
Maggie Messitt is the author of The Rainy Season, long-listed for the 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award in South Africa, where she was a journalist and editor for eight years. A PhD candidate in creative nonfiction at Ohio University, she currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Carlow University.
Photo by Derek Shaptondiv>Claire Messud
Claire Messud is the author of three novels and a book of novellas. Her last novel, The Emperor’s Children, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and was selected by the New York Times as one of their ten best books of 2006. She spent the academic year 2010–11 as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her new novel, The Woman Upstairs, will be published in 2013.
Juan Carlos Mestre
Juan Carlos Mestre (b. 1957, Villafranca del Bierzo, Spain) is a poet, essayist, and graphic artist. He has published twenty-seven books of poems. Five of his collections have won major Spanish prizes: Antífona del otoño en el Valle del Bierzo, the 1985 Premio Adonáis; La poesía ha caído en desgracia, the 1992 Premio Jaime Gil de Biedma; La tumba de Keats, the 1999 Premio Jaén de poesía; La casa roja, the 2009 Premio Nacional de poesía; and La bicicleta del panadero, the 2012 Premio de la Crítica de poesía castellana. In 2018 he published his latest collection, El museo de la clase obrera.
Philip Metres
Philip Metres has written ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020) and The Sound of Listening (2018). Awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the NEA, and three Arab American Book Awards, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.
Mohamed Metwalli
Mohamed Metwalli won the Yussef El-Khal Prize by Riyad El-Rayes Publishers in Lebanon for his poetry collection Once upon a Time in 1992. He was poet-in-residence at the University of Chicago in 1998. Other collections include The Story the People Tell in the Harbour (1998), The Lost Promenades (2010), and A Song by the Aegean Sea (2015). He compiled and co-edited an anthology of offbeat Egyptian poetry, Angry Voices, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2002.
Photo: Farlit.fodiv>Sólrún Michelsen
Sólrún Michelsen’s publications includes books for children and both fiction and poetry for adults. In 2004 she was awarded the Faroese M. A. Jacobsen Literary Award for Tema við slankum. Her novel Hinumegin er mars was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2015.
Tiffany Midge
Tiffany Midge (Hunkpapa Lakota) is a poetry editor for The Rumpus and a humor columnist for Indian Country Media Network. Her poetry collection The Woman Who Married a Bear (University of New Mexico Press, 2016) won the Kenyon Review Earthworks Indigenous Poetry Prize and a Western Heritage Award. Midge’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Butter, Waxwing, Moss, Okey-Pankey, Mud City, Apex, The Rumpus, and World Literature Today and has been widely anthologized.
Dunya Mikhail
Award-winning poet Dunya Mikhail (b. 1965) was born in Iraq, where she worked as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer. Facing increasing threats from the Iraqi authorities, she fled first to Jordan, then to the United States in 1996. Her books include The Iraqi Nights, Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, and The War Works Hard, which was named one of the New York Public Library’s “Twenty-Five Books to Remember from 2005.” She currently works as an Arabic special lecturer at Oakland University in Michigan.
Joseph Millar
Joseph Millar grew up in western Pennsylvania and was educated at Pennsylvania State University and Johns Hopkins University, where he earned an MA in poetry writing. He worked as a commercial fisherman and telephone repairman for more than twenty years, and his accessible narrative poems, influenced by the work of poets Philip Levine and James Wright, often take working life as a means of engaging themes of class, family, and romantic love. In a 2009 interview for Pirene’s Fountain with Charles Morrison, Millar stated, “We must have the ambition for our poems that they reach toward the sublime, that they speak from our own true selves and are grounded in the experience of our daily lives, including our dreams and hopes.”
Kiriu Minashita
Kiriu Minashita was born in 1970 in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. She is a poet and sociologist specializing in the sociology of body culture. Her first book of poems, to be published in English as Sonic Peace, won the eleventh annual Chuya Nakahara Prize in 2006. Her second book, The Z Border (Shichosha, 2008), won the forty-ninth annual Bansui Prize in 2008. She is also the author of several critical writings.
Wu Ming-yi
Born in 1971, Wu Ming-yi is a Taiwanese writer, painter, designer, photographer, environmental activist, traveler, and blogger all rolled into one. Over the last decade, he has produced an impressive body of work, especially with his fiction and nature writing. Wu studied advertising at Fu-Jen Catholic University and received a PhD in Chinese literature from National Central University. He has been teaching literature and creative writing at National Dong Hwa University since 2000, where he is a professor in the Department of Chinese.
