Authors

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

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  • Orbita

    Orbita formed in 1999 when Latvian poets Artur Punte, Sergey Timofejev, Semyon Khanin, Zhorzh Uallik, and Vladimir Svetlov, who write in Russian, got together to establish a "text-group." The mulitimedia project entitled Orbita (The Orbit) birthed from these roots starting out with readings in clubs, city squares, and even a small ship, from locations spanning Riga, Moscow, Minsk, Stockhom, Prague, Leipzig, and New York. In 2000 the group produed a CD titled O2 and in 2001 they held a poetic video festival, Word in Motion. Orbita 4 was released as a poetry CD+DVD in 2004. The audio CD is a collaboration with a variety of musicians from Riga, Moscow and St. Petersburg. The DVD is compiled works of Latvian artists from two video festivals and new videopoems from Orbita and partners. Orbita's website is www.orbita.lv.



  • Romeo Oriogun

    Romeo Oriogun (@SonOfOlokun), a Nigerian poet, is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Poetry Review, Poetry London, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, he is an alumni of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work was profiled in the Spring 2020 issue of World Literature Today.



  • Peter Orner

    Peter Orner is the author of Love and Shame and Love, a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book, and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a novel set in Namibia and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Two books will be out in 2013, a reissue of his first book, Esther Stories, and a new story collection, Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge. Born in Chicago, Orner lives in San Francisco.


  • Jorge Ortega

    Jorge Ortega (b. 1972, Mexicali) is one of Mexico’s most celebrated contemporary poets. His recent collection, Devoción por la piedra, won Mexico’s highly coveted poetry prize named in honor of Jaime Sabines, the Premio Internacional de Poesía Jaime Sabines of 2010. Other titles include Ajedrez de polvo (Tsé-Tsé, 2003) and Estado del tiempo (Poesía Hiperión, 2004). His work has been included in numerous anthologies in Mexico and the United States, including Across the Line. The Poetry of Baja California (Junction Press, 2002). His poetry and translations of such poets as Hart Crane have appeared in such journals as Letras Libres, The Bitter Oleander, The Black Herald Review, Crítica, and Structo.



  • Anna Maria Ortese

    Anna Maria Ortese (1914–1998) was an Italian writer of short stories, novels, and reportage. Her prolific body of work encompasses elements of neorealism and magical realism. She spent parts of the 1930s and 1940s living in Naples, and her 1953 collection Il mare non bagna Napoli documents her impressions of the postwar city.


  • T. Patrick Ortez

    T. Patrick Ortez is a WLT intern and graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, where he is pursuing a career as a speculative-fiction writer. His passions include dogs, cooking, and Mexican culture. 



  • Simon J. Ortiz

    Poet, fiction, and creative nonfiction writer Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) is a retired Regents Professor at Arizona State University and editor emeritus of Red Ink journal. He is determined to express an Indigenous voice that he believes is the essence of present-day reality, conscience, culture, and sense of responsibility.



  • Photo by Harold Baquetdiv>

    Brenda Marie Osbey

    Brenda Marie Osbey is a poet, essayist, and librettist working in English and French. Her six books include her collected poems, All Souls: Essential Poems (LSU Press, 2015); History and Other Poems (Time Being, 2013); and All Saints: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1997). The first peer-selected poet laureate of Louisiana (2005–2007), Osbey is a native New Orleanian.



  • Shauna Osborn

    Shauna Osborn is an award-winning Numunuu (Comanche) / German mestiza artist, researcher, and wordsmith. Her debut poetry collection is called Arachnid Verve. She was recently named national director of the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. You can find her online at shaunamosborn.wordpress.com.


  • J. David Osborne

    J. David Osborne is the author of Black Gum. He runs the indie press Broken River Books out of Norman, Oklahoma.



  • Sanya Osha

    Sanya Osha is the author of several books, including Postethnophilosophy (2011), Dust, Spittle and Wind (2011), An Underground Colony of Summer Bees (2012), and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow (expanded ed., 2021), among other publications. He works at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, South Africa.



  • Ladan Osman

    Ladan Osman (@OsmanLadan) is a Somali-born artist whose work is a lyric and exegetic response to problems of race, gender, displacement, and colonialism. She is the author of Exiles of Eden (2019) and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (2015), winner of a Sillerman First Book Prize. Her most recent collection, Exiles of Eden, is a work of poetry, photos, and experimental text. Her work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Roar, Rumpus, among others. Osman’s writing has been translated into over ten languages. She currently lives in Brooklyn.



  • Niyi Osundare

    Nigerian poet, playwright, essayist, and scholar Niyi Osundare has authored eighteen books of poetry, two books of selected poems, four plays, two books of essays, and numerous scholarly articles and reviews. Among his many prizes are the Tchicaya U Tam’si Award for African Poetry (generally regarded as Africa’s highest poetry prize) and the Fonlon/Nichols Award for “excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa.” Former professor and chair of the English Department, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, he is currently Distinguished Professor of English, University of New Orleans.



  • Jamal Ouariachi

    Dutch writer Jamal Ouariachi won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2017 for his novel A Hunger, which is currently being translated into ten different languages.



  • Kyrié Eleison Owen

    Kyrié Eleison Owen is an Indigenous writer with an MFA in creative writing, nonfiction, from University of California Riverside and a BA in creative writing from University of Cincinnati. She has words in Lunch Ticket, The Nasiona, Boshemia, and Waxing & Waning, among other literary journals, and has shared her work onstage at True Theatre.



  • © Bernd Hartungdiv>

    Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

    Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (b. 1968) is the author of the novel Dust, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize. Winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, she has also received an Iowa Writers’ Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications, and she has been a TEDx Nairobi speaker and a Lannan Foundation resident. She lives in Nairobi, Kenya. Photo courtesy of Penguin Random House



  • Nilay Özer

    An Istanbul-born and raised poet, Nilay Özer received her PhD from Bilkent University and teaches Turkish, creative writing, and modern Turkish literature at major universities in Istanbul. Following her early poems published in various literary magazines, Ozer’s first poetry volume, Zamana Dağılan Nar (Pomegranate scattered across time) appeared in 1999. Her second book, Ol! (Be!), received the Cemal Süreya Poetry Award in 2004. Her most recent poetry volume, Korkuluklara Giysi Yardımı (Clothes-drive for scarecrows), was published in 2015.



  • Toti O’Brien

    Toti O’Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. Born in Rome, living in Los Angeles, she is an artist, musician, and dancer. She is the author of Other Maidens (BlazeVOX, 2020) and An Alphabet of Birds (Moonrise Press, 2020).


  • Peter O’Brien

    Peter O’Brien has published five books, including Introduction to Literature: British, American, Canadian (Harper & Row) and Cleopatra at the Breakfast Table: Why I Studied Latin with My Teenager and How I Discovered the Daughterland (Quattro). He attended Notre Dame (BA), McGill (MA), and the Banff School of Fine Arts. His writings on art and literature have appeared in The Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette, and Journal of Canadian Art History, among others.



  • Tess O’Dwyer

    Tess O’Dwyer is a translator, editor, and arts consultant in New York City. She and Frederick Luis Aldama co-edited Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi (2020), with a foreword by Ilan Stavans. She also translated Empire of Dreams (1994), by Giannina Braschi, and Martin Rivas (2000), by Alberto Blest Gana. She is a board member of the Academy of American Poets.



  • Laurence O’Dwyer

    Laurence O’Dwyer is a graduate of University College Cork and holds a PhD in paradigms of memory formation from Trinity College Dublin. In 2017 he received a MacDowell Fellowship. In 2016 he won the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry. He has also won a Hennessy New Irish Writing Award and been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for Poetry. His brain-imaging research in autism and Alzheimer’s disease has been published in a range of academic journals, and his science journalism appears in the Guardian and the Irish Medical Times. In 2016 he devoted his time to writing and long-distance mountain running, mostly in the Pyrenees. Current projects include a collaboration with Asylum Productions for a theater performance that merges poetry and an academic lecture about memory and neuroscience. He also collaborates with Swedish indie game developer Macalaus, contributing texts for a game about space-travel and the search for home.



  • Photo: Michael Markl div>

    Mandakini Pachauri

    Mandakini Pachauri is an Indian poet writing in English. She lives in Vienna and is currently pursuing the Pan-European MFA at Cedar Crest College.



  • Ben Packham

    Ben Packham lives in Sydney, Australia, working as an accountant. In his spare time, he indulges his hobbies of photography, woodworking, and riding his motorbike. He spent a year living and working in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, with the United Nations between 2011 and 2012.



  • Deena Padayachee

    Deena Padayachee is a native of Durban, South Africa, and works as a medical doctor in an Apartheid-era township in the city. During Apartheid, when the publishing of such tales was virtually impossible in the mainstream South African magazines, his short stories were published mainly in New York (Short Story International). During Apartheid, he published a book of prose poems called A Voice from the Cauldron (1987). His prizewinning book, What’s Love Got to Do with It? was prescribed for Kwa Zulu Natal matric students in 2004. His short stories have been widely anthologized.


  • Leonardo Padura

    The 2012 winner of Cuba’s National Prize for Literature, Leonardo Padura is perhaps best known for his Havana Quartet detective series. Writing from the house where he was born, near Havana, Padura has authored several novels as well as short fiction and essays. The English translation of El hombre que amaba a los perros (The Man Who Loved Dogs), forthcoming in December, will be Padura’s first U.S. publication.



  • Alexandra Pagán Vélez

    Alexandra Pagán Vélez is the author of the story collections El diccionario y el Capitán (2010), Amargo (2014, 2018), Eneida y Martín: dos coquíes muy distintos (2018), Horror-REAL (2017, 2020), and Relatos de domingos (2014). She has also published the poetry collections Del Alzheimer y otros demonios (2014) and Cuando era niña hablaba como niña (2014).


  • Novia Pagone

    Novia Pagone is a visiting assistant professor of Spanish at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Her current research focuses on questions of mediation and female political subjectivity during twentieth-century political transitions in the literature and journalism of Spain and Argentina. Her general research and teaching interests include twentieth- and twenty-first century Spanish and Catalan literature, journalism, and film.



  • Courtesy of NHPR (http://nhpr.org)div>

    Tom Paine

    Tom Paine’s story “Oppenheimer Beach” appeared in the November 2012 issue of WLT. His poetry is upcoming or published in The Nation, Glasgow Review of Books, Volt, Fence, Blackbox Manifold (Cambridge), The Common, Epiphany, Green Mountain Review, Forklift, Tinderbox, Hunger Mountain, Hotel Amerika, Gulf Stream, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. Stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New England Review, The Boston Review, Best New Southern Stories, The O. Henry Awards and twice in the Pushcart Prize anthology. He has won fellowships from Sewanee, Yaddo, and Bread Loaf and written for Francis Ford Coppola. His first collection, Scar Vegas (Harcourt), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a PEN/Hemingway finalist. A graduate of Princeton and the Columbia MFA program, he is an associate professor in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire ([email protected]).



  • Frank Paino

    Frank Paino’s poems have appeared in a variety of literary publications, including North American Review, Briar Cliff Review, and Lake Effect. He has received a Pushcart Prize, the Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature, and a 2016 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. His third book, Obscura, is forthcoming from Orison Books in 2020.


  • Thomas Palakeel

    A bilingual writer in English and Malayalam, Thomas Palakeel teaches creative writing and English Renaissance literature at Bradley University, in Peoria, Illinois.