Oscar Hokeah’s Calling for a Blanket Dance, a cutting novel about challenge, resilience, and the support of one’s community, won the 2023 PEN America/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and was named a fi…
Interviews
Irina Flige / Courtesy of the authorIn April 2023 Irina Flige—director of the Research and Information Center “Memorial” in St. Petersburg, Russia, and a longtime board member of Memorial Internationa…
Writer, artist, and photographer Ibrahim Nasrallah was born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were uprooted from their land in 1948. The author of fourteen poetry collections and twenty-four novels,…
Rita Chang-Eppig’s debut novel, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, tells the story of a woman who fights to survive and the cost that survival demands. Based on the real life of a Chinese pirate queen n…
As an eminent poet, translator, man of letters, teacher, anthologist, literary ambassador, family man, and clear-eyed witness to America’s zeitgeist and character over the past half century, Robert Pi…
For Shizue Ogawa, creating is more important than publishing and selling, and yet her readership has been steadily growing in Japan and internationally. Her poetry paints the world with serenity and w…
Serge Chamchinov is a man of many languages and a scientist, visual artist, writer, and book binder. He creates first, then self-promotes his books through book reviews, exhibitions, and poetry festiv…
Photo by Yousef Al-AbdullahWith her latest book of essays, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times (2022), Iranian American writer Azar Nafisi offers a “resistance readi…
Ebony Iman Dallas, Songs of Freedom (2021), acrylic and Ghanaian textiles on hand-carved birchwood / Portrait of activist and teacher Clara Luper singing with members of the NAACP Youth Coun…
Siphiwe Ndlovu. Photo by Joanne Olivier If—as Booker Prize–winner Damon Galgut said—2021 was a good year for African writing, 2022 was especially good for Zimbabwean writers. I spoke with novelis…
Photo by Andrey Natotsinsky Maria Stepanova is a prizewinning poet and the author of In Memory of Memory, a volume of creative nonfiction that has been recognized with many Russian and E…
Danae Sioziou (b. 1987) was raised in Germany and Greece and works as a cultural manager and educator. Her books to date include Useful Children Games and Probable Landscapes, publi…
Shoshana Bellen standing in front of a typical building in DP Camp Föhrenwald, 1948 (Blimeh Hellman) In his ongoing column, which appears in every other issue, Karlos K. Hill highlights the effor…
R. O. KWON’S work as a writer and editor explores our thorniest truths: whom we love, what we believe, and the kind of sex we want to have. I first encountered Kwon when I read her a…
Photo by Lucas Marquardt The following interview with Ada Limón took place shortly after her appointment, in July 2022, as the 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.…
Basma Abdel Aziz is an Egyptian author and psychiatrist recognized for her fictional works al-Ṭābūr (2013; Eng. The Queue, 2016; reviewed in WLT) and…
Laura Larson, Augustine’s Escape, Digital Color Photograph, 2019 In City of Incurable Women (Saint Lucy Books, 2022), Laura Larson continues her study of nineteenth-century photogra…
Holocaust Concept Jewish Shoes For Remembrance Day, Auschwitz Birkenau Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a new and dynamic poetic voice from Poland, with six volumes of poetry and several translations on t…
Fulton Leroy Washington (aka Mr. Wash), Emancipation Proclamation (2014) / Courtesy of the artist / ARTBYWASH.COM The story of how Fulton Leroy Washington became an internationally acclaimed…
Author of The Famished Road, among other books, Ben Okri has never been a run-of-the-mill writer. He has been hailed as “a literary and social visionary,” and his oeuvre—novels, plays, poetr…
Photo by pixarno – stock.adobe.com I first came across Maša Kolanović’s illustrated novel, Sloboština Barbie (Underground Barbie), written in Croatian and published by VBZ in 2008, as I comp…
Jennifer Wong is a poet, critic, and translator based in the UK. Her first two poetry collections, Summer Cicadas (2006) and Goldfish (2013), were published by Chameleon Press i…
Amitava Kumar, The Heart of the City / A Cemetery / of Grief. Inspired by Naveen Kishore’s poem “Kashmiriyat” in his new collection, Knotted Grief. Amitava Kumar—author, most r…
Felix Lembersky, Execution: Babyn Yar (1952), oil on canvas, 35 1/4 x 46 3/8 in. / Private collection Yelena Lembersky (b. 1969) grew up in Leningrad at a time when Jews were starting to…
Tumbalá, Chiapas / Photo by Carol Rose Little The following interview was conducted in Ch’ol at the poet’s house in Tumbalá, Mexico, on January 7, 2022. Little and Friedman’s translations of thre…
