Photo by Tennessee Reed Since becoming a newspaper columnist at sixteen, Ishmael Reed has been a literary force. The author of over thirty titles, including the acclaimed novel Mumbo Jumbo…

  Left: Holly Wilson, Carried in the Wind (2019), 19 x 32 x 3 in., unique cast bronze with patina/ Courtesy of the artist / hollywilson.com Right: Holly Wilson, Girl in the Red Dress…

Image Courtesy of National Park Service In the fall of 2021, I taught a special-topics course on Native women writers, featuring the works of Diane Glancy, Louise Erdrich, and Joy Harjo. My students…

Photo of Rajiv Mohabir by Jordan Miles During the University of California Riverside’s 45th Writers Week in February 2022, Rajiv Mohabir read from his book of poems Cutlish…

Eloghosa Osunde and Okwiri Oduor. Photo of Oduor by Chelsea Bieker. It’s hard to argue with Booker Prize–winning author Damon Galgut’s assertion that 2021 was “a great year for African writing.”…

  Lisa Bird-Wilson is a Saskatchewan Métis and Cree writer and activist. Her debut novel, Probably Ruby (Hogarth / Penguin Random House), will be published in April 2022 in the US, following…

  Sandra Cisneros’s success as a poet, short-story writer, novelist, and essayist is tied to her determination to write about others with awareness and love. Her work is populated by powerful people—…

Photo by Lee LeFever / Flickr With student participants Leila Bagenstos, Sophia Cunningham, Cassy Fantini, Isolde Gerosa, Jae Tak Kim, and Grace Sewell Until recently, poet Julia Nemirovskay…

  Comma House. Photo by Tom Little Tuhin Das is a Bengali poet, essayist, activist, and short-story writer. Currently a writer-in-residence of City of Asylum Pittsburgh, he recently comp…

Julie Otsuka / Photo © Jean-Luc Bertini With the 2022 publication of The Swimmers (Knopf), Julie Otsuka has moved into more personal territory, drawing on her experience as a daughter watchi…

For many years, better opportunities on foreign shores, political turmoil, and the Maoist insurgency in Nepal have contributed to a large-scale migration to foreign countries. Many Nepalese writers,…

When Don Evans, the founding executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, contacted me in August 2019 to contribute a piece for the program that honored Sterling Plumpp with the Fuller Aw…

The creative writing of the twenty-first century will be remembered for having sanctioned the passage of text from paper to digital support. But is it really true that the author’s cards have disappe…

  Weina Dai Randel burst onto the literary scene a number of years ago with her duology about Empress Wu Zetian, China’s first woman leader. After winning the prestigious Rita Award in 2017 and seein…

Victoria Chang’s new collection, Dear Memory, expands the field of the memoir for readers to explore a full-color archive of family photos and historical documents collaged between…

  Photo by Diane Picchiottino / Unsplash That Famous Abyss (Wunderkammer, 2020) is a book of exclusive interviews with Enrique Vila-Matas by cultural journalist Anna María Iglesia, covering such…

Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s astonishing debut novel, The House of Rust, winner of the inaugural Graywolf Press Africa Prize, arrived in October as if on a magical wave, imbued wit…

  Photo by Kari Gunter-Seymour / www.karigunterseymourpoet.com Kari Gunter-Seymour (b. 1955) is having a moment—soon to become two years of moments since she was appointed in June 2020 t…

  Denise Duong is a Vietnamese American artist whose artwork appears on the cover of the Autumn 2021 issue of World Literature Today. Her paintings, drawings, and murals tell st…

Dimitris Lyacos with Marsias / Photo by Walter Melcher In 2019 I interviewed Dimitris Lyacos on the occasion of the US tour/launch of his trilogy, Poena Damni, which had been recently re…

As a longtime admirer of Chase Twichell’s powerfully spare poetry that combines the wisdom of her Zen practice with her sharp perspicacity for ordinary things, I have wanted to engage in a convers…

Emilio Fraia’s Sevastopol, out this summer from New Directions, is the sort of book that beguiles and dazzles in equal measure. Consisting of three disparate stories—of a m…

Earlier this spring, the editors of WLT invited twenty-one writers to nominate a single book, published since the year 2000, that has had a major influence on their own work, along with…

Photo by Oluwaseyi Johnson / Unsplash I was lucky to meet Romalyn Ante when I was invited to read at a virtual event organized by R. A. Villanueva and hosted by Books Are Magic in August 2020. Ante w…

Photo of Sulaiman Addonia by Alexander Meeus. For me, one of the most astounding books of this past year—which may have slipped your attention due to the pandemic—was Silence Is My Mother Tongue…