Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.
Maggie Messitt
Maggie Messitt is the author of The Rainy Season, long-listed for the 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award in South Africa, where she was a journalist and editor for eight years. A PhD candidate in creative nonfiction at Ohio University, she currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Carlow University.
Photo by Derek Shaptondiv>Claire Messud
Claire Messud is the author of three novels and a book of novellas. Her last novel, The Emperor’s Children, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and was selected by the New York Times as one of their ten best books of 2006. She spent the academic year 2010–11 as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her new novel, The Woman Upstairs, will be published in 2013.
Juan Carlos Mestre
Juan Carlos Mestre (b. 1957, Villafranca del Bierzo, Spain) is a poet, essayist, and graphic artist. He has published twenty-seven books of poems. Five of his collections have won major Spanish prizes: Antífona del otoño en el Valle del Bierzo, the 1985 Premio Adonáis; La poesía ha caído en desgracia, the 1992 Premio Jaime Gil de Biedma; La tumba de Keats, the 1999 Premio Jaén de poesía; La casa roja, the 2009 Premio Nacional de poesía; and La bicicleta del panadero, the 2012 Premio de la Crítica de poesía castellana. In 2018 he published his latest collection, El museo de la clase obrera.
Philip Metres
Philip Metres has written twelve books, including Fugitive/Refuge (2024) and Shrapnel Maps (2020). Winner of three Arab American Book Awards, a Guggenheim and two NEA fellowships, and a Pushcart Prize, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.
Mohamed Metwalli
Mohamed Metwalli won the Yussef El-Khal Prize by Riyad El-Rayes Publishers in Lebanon for his poetry collection Once upon a Time in 1992. He was poet-in-residence at the University of Chicago in 1998. Other collections include The Story the People Tell in the Harbour (1998), The Lost Promenades (2010), and A Song by the Aegean Sea (2015). He compiled and co-edited an anthology of offbeat Egyptian poetry, Angry Voices, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2002.
Madeline Meyers
Madeline Meyers is a senior English major at the University of Oklahoma. She is a WLT intern and editor-in-chief of The Aster Review, the WLT Student Advisory Board’s undergraduate arts and literature journal. In her free time, she co-leads Outdoor Adventure, a hiking club for Honors students.
Photo: Farlit.fodiv>Sólrún Michelsen
Sólrún Michelsen’s publications includes books for children and both fiction and poetry for adults. In 2004 she was awarded the Faroese M. A. Jacobsen Literary Award for Tema við slankum. Her novel Hinumegin er mars was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2015.
Tiffany Midge
Tiffany Midge (Hunkpapa Lakota) is a poetry editor for The Rumpus and a humor columnist for Indian Country Media Network. Her poetry collection The Woman Who Married a Bear (University of New Mexico Press, 2016) won the Kenyon Review Earthworks Indigenous Poetry Prize and a Western Heritage Award. Midge’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Butter, Waxwing, Moss, Okey-Pankey, Mud City, Apex, The Rumpus, and World Literature Today and has been widely anthologized.
Dunya Mikhail
Award-winning poet Dunya Mikhail (b. 1965) was born in Iraq, where she worked as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer. Facing increasing threats from the Iraqi authorities, she fled first to Jordan, then to the United States in 1996. Her books include The Iraqi Nights, Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, and The War Works Hard, which was named one of the New York Public Library’s “Twenty-Five Books to Remember from 2005.” She currently works as an Arabic special lecturer at Oakland University in Michigan.
Joseph Millar
Joseph Millar grew up in western Pennsylvania and was educated at Pennsylvania State University and Johns Hopkins University, where he earned an MA in poetry writing. He worked as a commercial fisherman and telephone repairman for more than twenty years, and his accessible narrative poems, influenced by the work of poets Philip Levine and James Wright, often take working life as a means of engaging themes of class, family, and romantic love. In a 2009 interview for Pirene’s Fountain with Charles Morrison, Millar stated, “We must have the ambition for our poems that they reach toward the sublime, that they speak from our own true selves and are grounded in the experience of our daily lives, including our dreams and hopes.”
Kiriu Minashita
Kiriu Minashita was born in 1970 in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. She is a poet and sociologist specializing in the sociology of body culture. Her first book of poems, to be published in English as Sonic Peace, won the eleventh annual Chuya Nakahara Prize in 2006. Her second book, The Z Border (Shichosha, 2008), won the forty-ninth annual Bansui Prize in 2008. She is also the author of several critical writings.
Wu Ming-yi
Born in 1971, Wu Ming-yi is a Taiwanese writer, painter, designer, photographer, environmental activist, traveler, and blogger all rolled into one. Over the last decade, he has produced an impressive body of work, especially with his fiction and nature writing. Wu studied advertising at Fu-Jen Catholic University and received a PhD in Chinese literature from National Central University. He has been teaching literature and creative writing at National Dong Hwa University since 2000, where he is a professor in the Department of Chinese.
Norman Minnick
Norman Minnick’s books of poetry include To Taste the Water and Folly. He is the editor of Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century and Work toward Knowing: Beginning with Blake, by Jim Watt. His poetry and essays have appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle, Georgia Review, Teachers & Writers, Poetry International, Oxford American, Columbia Review, Southword (Ireland), Stand (England), and Notre Dame Review, among others.
Michelle Mirabella
Michelle Mirabella is the translator of “Ferns,” Catalina Infante Beovic’s English-language debut (WLT, 2020). Her work also appears in Latin American Literature Today, Firmament, Arkansas International, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and an alumna of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.
Deborah A. Miranda
Deborah A. Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation) is the author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award) as well as three poetry collections. Miranda teaches creative writing, composition, and literature of the margins at Washington & Lee University.
Sarah Mirk
Sarah Mirk is a visual journalist and author of several books. She is a contributing editor for comics publication The Nib and is the former online editor of Bitch magazine. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter @sarahmirk.
Emad Mirmotahari
Emad Mirmotahari is associate professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His interests are African fiction, world literature, and postcolonial literatures. He teaches courses on race and immigration through a literary lens on a regular basis.
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish is a scholar, poet, and essayist. Her recent books are a poetry collection, What I Learned at the War (West End Press, 2016), and Oklahomeland: Essays (Lamar University Press, 2015). She directs the Red Earth Creative Writing MFA at Oklahoma City University.
Jitendra Nath Misra
Jitendra Nath Misra is a retired Indian ambassador and Distinguished Fellow at the Jindal School of International Affairs, O. P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India. He has academic and literary publications in world-renowned journals in India, the U.S. and Portugal, and over 150 op-ed columns in India, Bangladesh, Thailand, and Vietnam. He regularly appears on television and has advised the government of Odisha state on sport. He is the author of The Sport of Pace and Grace: A Biography of Field Hockey, forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Photo by R. Romero © 2019div>Poupeh Missaghi
Writer, educator, a translator both into and out of Persian, and an editor, poupeh missaghi is joining the English Department at the University of Denver as an assistant professor in the fall of 2022. Her first novel, trans(re)lating house one, was published in 2020 by Coffee House Press and reviewed in the Summer 2020 issue of WLT. Her conversation with Yanara Friedland also appeared on the WLT blog. Her translation of Nasim Marashi’s award-winning novel I’ll Be Strong for You was published in 2021 by Astra House.
Photo by Shevaun Williamsdiv>Rohinton Mistry
Rohinton Mistry was born in 1952 in Bombay (now Mumbai). He graduated with a degree in mathematics from the University of Bombay in 1974 and immigrated to Canada with his wife the following year, settling in Toronto.
Mistry wrote his first short story, “One Sunday,” in 1983, winning first prize in the Canadian Hart House Literary Contest (an award he also won the following year for his short story “Auspicious Occasion”). It was followed in 1985 by the Annual Contributors’ Award from Canadian Fiction Magazine, and he then received a Canada Council grant, whereupon he left his job as a bank clerk and became a full-time writer.
Photo by Brie Childersdiv>Stephen Mitchell
Stephen Mitchell’s many books include the best-selling Tao Te Ching, Gilgamesh, The Gospel According to Jesus, The Book of Job, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Bhagavad Gita, The Second Book of the Tao, The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Beowulf.
Czesław Miłosz
Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) was a poet, writer, and translator who was born in present-day Lithuania. His first book of poetry was published in 1934. After World War II, where he spent his time in Warsaw, Miłosz defected to Paris in 1951, and the Communist government of Poland banned his works. He emigrated to the United States in 1960, where he began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. It would not be until the Iron Curtain fell that Miłosz would be able to return to Poland, where he split his time between Poland and the United States until the time of his death. He won the 1978 Neustadt Prize.
Deena Mohamed
Deena Mohamed is an Egyptian designer, illustrator, and writer. She first began making comics at eighteen, when she created the viral webcomic Qahera, a satirical superhero strip starring a visibly Muslim superheroine. Her new work, Shubeik Lubeik, heralds the arrival of a huge new talent and a brave, literary, political, and feminist new voice. Originally published in Arabic in Egypt, Shubeik Lubeik was awarded the Best Graphic Novel prize and the Grand Prize at the 2017 Cairo Comix Festival.
Sadek R. Mohammed
Sadek R. Mohammed, poet, scholar, and translator, is the author of the collection Archaeology of Scorched Cities (2013) and the co-editor of Flowers of Flame: Unheard Voices of Iraq (2008, IPPY/Independent Publisher Book Award) and Ishtar’s Songs: Iraqi Poetry since the 1970s (2011), of which he was the translator. He is a professor of English at the University of Mustansiriya and director of the Baghdad UNESCO City of Literature.
Shene Mohammed
Shene Mohammed is the assistant director at Kashkul, where she also works as an archivist, translator, and literary critic.