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…
Interviews
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 Counc…
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 nov…
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 a…
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,…
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 t…
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…
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 Co…
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-ce…
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 a…
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—n…
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 VB…
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…
Amitava Kumar, The Heart of the City / A Cemetery / of Grief. Inspired by Naveen Kishore’s poem “Kashmiriyat” in his new collection, Knotted Gr…
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 sta…
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…
The African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) promotes and advances the development and publication of the poetic arts through its book series, contests, workshops, and seminars, and thr…
Antonello da Messina, Saint Jerome in His Study (ca. 1475), oil on lime, 45.7 x 36.2cm / Reproduced by permission of the National Gallery, London Henrietta Rose-Innes is a South African a…
Masiyaleti Mbewe, “Tove the Guardian,” Niko n D7000, 3/4 (First Edition), 2018 Masiyaleti Mbewe is a Zambian queerfuturist writer, photographer, and activist raised in Botswan…
Photo by Catherine Hélie © Editions Gallimard Noémi Lefebvre is a multitalented writer. She studied music, received a PhD in music education and national identity in France and…
Reem Khader, Faces Offshoot / Courtesy of the artist In her novel Minor Detail, Palestinian author Adania Shibli sculpts—with trenchant words—a fragile memor…
