Daniel Simon

;
Photo by Alba Simon

Daniel Simon is a poet, essayist, translator, and WLT’s assistant director and editor in chief. His 2017 edited volume, Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology, 1867–2017, won a 2018 Nebraska Book Award. His most recent edited collection, Dispatches from the Republic of Letters: 50 Years of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (Deep Vellum/Phoneme, 2020), was a Publishers Weekly starred pick. Under a Gathering Sky, his third book of poems, was published by SFA Press in April 2024.

  • Daniel Simon
    Think of consciousness as a territory just opening to settlement and exploitation, something like an Oklahoma land rush. Put it in color, set it to music, frame it in images. . . . – Saul Be…
  • Daniel Simon
    In the spirit of the dead, the living, and the unborn, empty your ears of all impurities, o listener, that you may hear my story. - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Wizard of the Crow (2006) Article 6 of…
  • Daniel Simon
    The forgetting happens only when memory is quashed by routine, when the bike is just a quotidian vehicle for getting from one place to the next. – Eric Freeze, “Hemingway on a Bike,” Harv…
  • Daniel Simon
    If poets as far-flung as France, Cuba, India, and Nicaragua comprised the avant-garde of literary modernism, a lookout in a turret in Chicago, Illinois, saw the invasion coming to America and, instea…
  • July 16, 2012 Daniel Simon
      Since the early 2000s, World Literature Today has been gingerly dipping a toe into the fast-flowing waters of the World Wide Web. In the early years, we started out by hosting a basic webs…
  • Daniel Simon
    The unbearable darkness of being.” That’s what the plays of Marina Carr, the 2012 Puterbaugh Fellow (page 42), are about, according to Melissa Sihra, professor of drama at Trinity College Du…
  • Daniel Simon
    No one in these days needs to be convinced that thoughts are powerful weapons, and we of Books Abroad like to believe that our publication is, in its way, an instrument of peace as well…
  • Daniel Simon
    In the end, it's about stories, and if I've learned one thing in fifteen years of being a foreign correspondent, only stories matter. – Anthony Shadid, "The Truths We Tell: Reporting on Faith, War…
  • Daniel Simon
    At the age of twenty, I became an accidental jazz aficionado at the same time I became an accidental English major. Two years earlier, when I entered the University of Nebraska–Lincoln as a freshman,…
  • Daniel Simon
    Daniel Simon, Assistant Director and Editor in Chief . . . there never was a match in the space between two nothings just a cry at either end and all that dazzling light. —Mona Nicole Sfeir, "Laws of…
  • Daniel Simon
    Daniel Simon, Assistant Director and Editor in Chief "We all keep trying to make sense in language of a world that baffles, amuses, and appalls us." – Virginia Euwer Wolff, April 25, 2010 (email) Tow…
  • Daniel Simon
    Daniel Simon, Assistant Director and Editor in Chief O my country, I can see the walls and arches and the columns and the statues and lonely towers of our ancestors, but I don't see the glory. —Giaco…
  • Daniel Simon
    Daniel Simon, Assistant Director and Editor in Chief It is the inability to be contained . . . that has allowed contemporary poetry to rethink language into a method of enlarging the sayable, and thu…