Authors

Gülten Akın

Gülten Akın is a Turkish poet and author of short plays.

Nour Al Ghraowi

Nour Al Ghraowi is a Syrian writer, activist, and educator. She has received an MFA in poetry at Texas State University. Her poetry and essay have appeared in Dame Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Mizna Literary Journal, Porter House Review and others. Nour writes about social justice, migrant identity, and what it means to be an immigrant in a place far from home, and finally she writes about feminism and what it means to be a feminist Middle Eastern woman.

Heba Al-Agha

Heba Al-Agha, a struggling mother, a concerned writer, and a creative-writing teacher at the A. M. Qattan Foundation in Gaza for thirteen years, recently launched the podcast On the Stairs of Gaza, documenting her experience of displacement and suffering. Her stories are published on numerous Arab and international websites. She recently fled to Cairo after spending two hundred days in the war on Gaza.

Nabel Al-Arini

Nabel Al-Arini is a prominent Palestinian writer, thinker, and novelist of twenty-five literary works. He has received numerous literary awards and honors. He founded the Touqan cultural project, the largest literary and intellectual cultural gathering in Palestine, which consists of a cultural center, literary salon, intellectual forum, and digital publishing imprint

Sadaa al-Daas

Sadaa al-Daas is an award-winning Kuwaiti playwright, author, and literary critic. Her works include Li’annī aswad (2010; Because I am black) and the short-story collection Mā lā taʿrifahu ʿan al-amīrāt (2017; What you don’t know about princesses). She heads the Department of Criticism at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Kuwait.

Haider Al-Ghazali

Haider Al-Ghazali, a twenty-year-old Palestinian poet from Gaza, studies English literature and translation at the Islamic University of Gaza. His poems have been translated into eight languages and published on various platforms. He volunteered with the Tamer Institute for Community Education and worked with the A. M. Qattan Foundation in child psychological first aid activities during the Gaza genocide.

Kifah Salama Al-Ghseen

Kifah Salama Al-Ghseen lives in the Gaza Strip and is currently displaced in a tent. Her home was in the city of Al-Zahraa, which was destroyed in the war. Dr. Al-Ghseen holds a master’s degree in journalism and a doctorate in media. She has eight publications, including poetry, novels, children’s literature, and journalism. She has received numerous awards and honors in Palestine and abroad.

Maram Al-Masri

A key figure in contemporary Arab poetry, Maram Al-Masri was born in Syria in 1962 and settled in France in 1982. The author of fifteen books, she has received many important literary prizes, including the Antonio Viccaro International Poetry Prize and the Dante Alighieri. In 2017 the Maram Al-Masri Prize was created, which rewards poetry and graphic works.

Mai Al-Nakib

Mai Al-Nakib is author of the novel An Unlasting Home and the award-winning short-story collection The Hidden Light of Objects. Her fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter, The First Line, After the Pause, Markaz Review, and Rowayat; her occasional essays in World Literature Today, BLARB, New Lines Magazine, and Index on Censorship, among others. She is associate professor of English and comparative literature at Kuwait University.

Montasser Al-Qaffash

Montasser Al-Qaffash has published four collections of short stories and three novels. Among other awards, in 2014 his At Eye Level was granted the Sawiris Cultural Award for best short-story collection.

Ziyad al-Qahem

Ziyad Ahmed al-Qahem lives in Sana’a, where he works as a linguist and literary editor as well as a poet. His book If the Tip of Your Dream Could Fly was awarded Yemen’s Presidential Prize for Young Authors’ Poetry in 2012. He is the author of the poetry collection Cracking the Moon (2013), and his poetic response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 was featured in the short documentary Shakespeare in Yemen (2018).

Shojaa Al-Safadi

Shojaa Al-Safadi is a Palestinian poet, writer, and political columnist. He holds an MA in international relations and a PhD in political science. A member of the General Union of Palestinian Writers and its Activities Committee, he founded and directed the Friendship Cultural Forum (2004–2014). He has published seven poetry and prose works through the Palestinian Ministry of Culture and the Writers’ Union.

Daniel Alarcón

Daniel Alarcón is an American author living in San Fransico, CA. He was born in Lima, Peru.

Samad Alavi

Samad Alavi is senior lecturer of Persian at the University of Oslo. He has published a number of essays and reviews in journals including WLT as well as translations of contemporary poetry from Iran.

Elyas Alavi

Elyas Alavi is a poet and visual artist based in Adelaide. Born in the Daykundi province of Afghanistan, he has published three poetry books: I Am a Daydreamer Wolf, published in 2008 in Tehran (5th ed., 2016), followed by Some Wounds (Kabul, 2012) and Hodood (Tehran, 2015).

Sandra Alcosser

Sandra Alcosser’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She was the NEA’s first Conservation Poet for the Wildlife Conservation Society and Poets House as well as Montana’s first poet laureate. She directs SDSU’s MFA and edits Poetry International.

Claribel Alegría

Claribel Alegría (b. 1924) is often considered the most important contributor to contemporary Central American literature. She was born in Estelí, Nicaragua, but spent most of her youth in the Santa Ana region of western El Salvador because of her father’s political exile. In 1943 she came to the United States to study at George Washington University, where she received her bachelors degree in philosophy and letters. She would not return to her country of origin until 1979, after the Sandinista National Liberation Front took control of the government. She is the 2006 laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Julia Alekseyeva

Julia Alekseyeva is assistant professor of English and cinema and media studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her debut nonfiction graphic novel, Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (Microcosm, 2017), won the VLA Diversity Award. She is currently working on her first academic monograph and a collection of graphic essays.

Dorothy Alexander

Dorothy Alexander is a poet, storyteller, and publisher from Cheyenne, Oklahoma. As co-owner of Village Books Press, she focuses on publishing Oklahoma poets. She has authored four collections of poetry herself, including her book Lessons from an Oklahoma Girlhood (2008) and Travelin’ Music: A Poetic Tribute to Woody Guthrie (2010).

André Alexis

Cristina Alger

Cristina Alger graduated from Harvard College in 2002 and from New York University School of Law in 2007. She has worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs and as an attorney at Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale, and Dorr. She lives in New York City, where she was born and raised. The Darlings is her first novel. She is currently working on her next book.

Yousri Alghoul

Novelist, short-story writer, and essayist Yousri Alghoul (Palestinian Territories) has published two novels and six collection of short stories. He received the 2002 Short Story Award from the Ministry of Culture. Alghoul is a member of the Palestinian Writers’ Union and is a committee member at the YMCA-Gaza and a number of civil society organizations.

Najwa Ali

Najwa Ali writes, despite intimate negotiations with silence. Crosses borders, sometimes inadvertently. Recent publications include essays and poems in World Literature Today, Room, Wasafiri, and Warscapes. Her essay “Writing, in Transit” won Room’s CNF Prize and was nominated for a Canadian National Magazine Award. Currently reediting a recalcitrant novel, completing a short-story collection, and embarking on a new novel. Can be found, sometimes, on Twitter @Najwa_Layla.

Kazim Ali

Kazim Ali has worked as a political organizer, lobbyist, and yoga instructor. His books include two volumes of poetry, The Far Mosque and The Fortieth Day; the novels Quinn’s Passage and The Disappearance of Seth; and a book of lyric prose, Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities. He has taught writing and literature at various colleges including the Culinary Institute of America, Monroe Community College, Shippensburg University, and New York University, and currently teaches at Oberlin College and in the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program. Co-founder of the small press Nightboat Books, his poetry and essays appear widely in such journals as Atlas, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, jubilat, and in Best American Poetry 2007.

Mayyu Ali

Mayyu Ali is a young Rohingya poet, writer, and humanitarian activist who runs the Youth Empowerment Centre in the refugee camp at Cox’s Bazaar, where approximately one million Rohingya refugees are displaced. Mayyu has written many poems and articles, mostly for rohingyablogger.com. His articles have also featured in Al Jazeera, Dhaka Tribune, and on CNN and the Financial Times. Recently he published The Blossom, including some of his early poems, distributed around the camps. His poems have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation (in a special feature on Rohingya poetry) as well as the Best English and Light of English magazines in Myanmar. His poems will appear in a pamphlet of Rohingya poetry and folk songs published by Arc Publications in July 2019.

Hasan Alizadeh

Iranian poet Hasan Alizadeh was born in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad in 1947. His poem “Terraces” was featured in Poetry Daily, translated by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould. Other poems have appeared in English in West Branch, Malahat Review, and Modern Poetry in Translation. House Arrest: Poems of Hasan Alizadeh (Arc Publications, 2022) will be the first translation of his poems into English. A reading from the manuscript of House Arrest can be viewed here.

Joshua Allan

Joshua Allan works for Routledge books in Oxford, England, and writes extensively on the side. He has published in WLT, the Oxford Review of Books, Undercurrent Philosophy, Full Stop, Eunoia Review, and other magazines.

Amanda Allard

Amanda Allard is an editorial intern at Big Sky Journal in Bozeman, Montana, where she writes about art and culture in the Northern Rockies. Amanda recently graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in French literature. The Lover is her first work of translation to be published.