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Essays

March 2018

Fractured but Whole, Separated but Together

By Joseph O. Legaspi

Bonifacio Global City, Manila, 2015. photo: jason reblando In 2015, while on a Fulbright research fellowship in the Philippines, I went on a walking tour of Intramuros, the famed walled city in Mani...
March 2018

Conversations at the Edge of Carnage

By Laurel Flores Fantauzzo

The missing persons bulletin board at Navotas City Police Station in Metro Manila, June 2017. Photo courtesy of the author Do so many opportunities to bear witness only create opportuniti...
March 2018

Bowled Over – A Life with Poems: The 2017 NSK Prize Keynote

By Marilyn Nelson

photos: shevaun williams & associates After being visibly moved by dance adaptations of four of her poems, Dr. Nelson delivered the following keynote to the packed audience in attendance, wh...
March 2018

Reinventing and Reimagining the World: A Tribute to Marilyn Nelson

By Hayan Charara

A statue of a young Carver at the George Washington Carver National Monument. photo: jinx!/flickr Hayan Charara, a poet, editor, essayist, and children’s book author, nominated Marilyn Nelson for...
March 2018

Migration, My Mother, and Me

By Sabina Murray

The Seer, by Maia Cruz Palileo A writer undergoes a transformation while overcoming a series of obstacles as she works to reunite her mother with her mother’s siblings in the Philippine...
March 2018

The Return of Scheherazade, or the Rise of the Iraqi Novel after 2003

By Sadek R. Mohammed

Mohammed Ghani Hikmat’s Save Iraqi Culture sculpture, featuring ancient Sumerian cuneiform script, is located in Baghdad’s Mansour District. The figure with multiple hands represents the dif...
March 2018

Trout Fishing in Tehran

By Shohreh Laici

illustration: jen rickard blair On the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, an Iranian writer (and devoted Brautigan reader) considers how he, perhaps ev...
January 2018

Border Ghosts

By Kapka Kassabova

Border village in winter, Turkey. Photo: Nedret Benzet Returning to the Bulgaria of her childhood, the author chronicles the insidious damage that a culture of hard borders inflicted on its sur...
January 2018

The Silenced Language

By Liliana Ancalao

The kultrún is the quintessential Mapuche instrument. A drum of carved wood and animal hide, it is traditionally played by a machi, or Mapuche shaman, during rituals and celebrations. Althou...
November 2017

A Grammar of Tolerance

By Hamza Yusuf

Jaume Plensa’s Tolerance statue and Rosemont Pedestrian Bridge, Houston, Texas / Photo by Patrick Feller If a profligate comes to you with news, make sure you understand it...
November 2017

Selective Empathy: Stories and the Power of Narrative

By Aminatta Forna

Photo: Daniel Tellman / Flickr Societies venerate their storytellers almost as much as the stories. We talk about the wonders that stories can create, the ways they can change t...
November 2017

Belief in an Age of Intolerance

By H. L. Hix

An old Japanese maple in the Japanese garden at the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis / Photo by Kent Burgess thewaysofthegarden.squarespace.com In this brief essay, poet and translator H. L....
November 2017

Following the Scent of Rumi’s Sufism in a Postreligious Age

By Jawid Mojaddedi

Photo by C. P. Ewing / Flickr Rumi remains the most popular poet in America today. To many who claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” his poems represent direct spiritual connection with a h...
November 2017

Seeking the Light through Literature

By Yahia Lababidi

Agostino Arrivabene (b. 1967, Italy), Androgynous, 2016, oil, gold leaf on linen, 50x40cm. Courtesy of the artist. Religion is at its best when it becomes a countercultural forc...
September 2017

May the End Be Well for All

By Marianna Pogosyan

Photo: Fardo Dopstra (Fardodopstra.com) The tradition of toast-giving has followed my family through centuries and continents. This essay tells the tale of one family’s survival and the toasts—po...
September 2017

Verse Africa: The Malleable Poetics of Some Contemporary African Poets

By Matthew Shenoda

Clockwise from Top: Ama Ata Aidoo, Aracelis Girmay, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Taking stock of the African Poetry Book Fund’s project to bring contemporary African poetry into the f...
September 2017

A Good Prisoner’s Handbook

By Kike

Photo: Miami Herald / Getty For some years, Enrique Ferrari, known in Buenos Aires as Kike (kee-Kay), lived in the United States. His stay ended the day a traffic cop asked him for his pa...
September 2017

Zeroes

By Leonora Flis

Photo: Jason Devaun The binaries of life bite at 3 a.m.You don’t need to fast-forward time.Envision vanishing before it happens.For those who care to...
September 2017

Letter from Kosovo

By Brian Sneeden

Each year, writers and musicians from across the globe converge in Kosovo for the three-day Festival of Literature in Orllan, a vibrant celebration of local and international literature. Here, poe...
September 2017

Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower: Survival Strategies in a Morally Ambivalent India

By Rositta Joseph Valiyamattam

Isolation: Companion of Conscience, by Georgitta J. Valiyamattam Iconoclast Indian novelist Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, set in the maximum city of Mumbai, is not only the...
September 2017

Migratory Art: The Aesthetics of Contact

By Shastri Akella

Migratory art refers to works that are visual (or aural) representations of the act of migration, made by immigrants. The concepts of body horror, evolution, and audio stimuli illuminate their aes...
May 2017

Native in the Twenty-first Century

By Susan Power

Native Nations Rise protest. Photo by Victoria Pickering/Flickr I’m mixed but that doesn’t mean I’m mixed up—it just means my parents fell in love across a racial and cultural divide that split my bl...
May 2017

Streaming

By Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Current (2005), acrylic on steel, 18 x 18 in, part of the Greater Vehicle series The innovator isn’t important. It’s whoever has the watershed moment....
May 2017

Continuing the Gift

By Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota / German / Welsh), Self-Reflection (2011), oil on canvas, 48 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist (dyaniwhitehawk.com) In Spring 1992 World Literature Today...
May 2017

Ebi Yeibo’s Poetic Unfolding of Nigeria’s Postcolonial History

By Ogaga Okuyade

Remnants of an oil spill in the Niger Delta. Photo: Michael Uwemedimo / cmapping.net Niger Delta poet Ebi Yeibo’s verse lyrically engages the Nigerian nation on looming postindependence issues wh...

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December 9, 2019

Announcing WLT’s 2019 Pushcart Prize Nominees

October 16, 2019

Ismail Kadare Wins Prestigious 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature

September 17, 2019

2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature Longlist Announced

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