Authors
Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.
Photo by Shevaun Williamsdiv>Margarita Engle
Margarita Engle is the Cuban American author of many verse novels, including Wild Dreamers, longlisted for the National Book Award, and The Surrender Tree, a Newbery Honor Book. Other awards include Pura Belpré Medals, Walter Honors, Américas Awards, the Jane Addams Award, PEN USA, and the NSK Neustadt Prize. Margarita served as the national 2017–2019 Young People’s Poet Laureate. Her most recent picture book is Eloísa’s Musical Window, and her next verse novel is Island Creatures. Engle studied agronomy and botany along with creative writing and now lives in central California with her entomologist husband and soccer-playing border collie.
Heid E. Erdrich
Poet Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain) is author of seven books including Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (2017). She also makes poem films with fellow Ojibwe and indigenous artists. Heid teaches in the low-res MFA program at Augsburg College.
Haydar Ergülen
Haydar Ergülen (b. 1956) is one of the most prominent poets writing in Turkey today. Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and another dozen of essays, his work is only beginning to appear in English. His most recent book is Öyle Küçük Şeyler (Kırmızı Kedi, 2016). He lives in Istanbul.
Photo by Isaac Meneses Roldandiv>Octavio Escobar Giraldo
Colombian writer Octavio Escobar Giraldo (b. 1962, Manizales) has received national and international awards for his novels, short stories, and poems, some of which have been translated into French, Italian, and German. His recent publications include the novel Cada oscura tumba (2022; Every dark tomb) and the book of poems Manual de hipocondría (2022; Hypochondria handbook). He is a physician and university professor. “Penance” is his debut in English. Photo by Isaac Meneses Roldán
Elvira Espejo Ayca
Elvira Espejo Ayca is an award winning poet, visual artist, weaver, and narrator of the indigenous Aymara and Quechua oral traditions of her home region of Oruro (Qaqachaka ayllu community), Bolivia. She is the director of the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in La Paz and was awarded the Goethe Medal in 2020.
Photo by Kristin Coferdiv>Veronica Esposito
Veronica Esposito is a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in serving transgender individuals; the “Untranslatable” columnist for WLT since 2023; and a regular contributor to venues including The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and San Francisco NPR affiliate KQED. She was a judge for the 2022 National Book Award in Translation.
Salvador Espriu
Salvador Espriu (1913–1985) has been described by Harold Bloom as “an extraordinary poet by any international standard” and “deserving of a Nobel Prize,” whose work is “preternaturally hushed, haunted by the skeptical wisdom of Job and Ecclesiastics.” The author of nine books of poems whose obscurity beyond Catalonia reflects that of the Catalan in which he wrote, Espriu is an elegiac poet whose work is informed metaphorically by the cataclysm of Franco’s conquest of Catalonia and the suppression of Catalan language and culture. Yet as he eschews mention of specific events and personages, his writing takes on an encompassing resonance.
Photo by Pear Tree Photographydiv>Nadine Estero
Nadine Estero has always loved cooking and art, and she combines her interests by re-creating food from anime, video games, and shows and sharing her creations on social media (@IssaGrill) with over one million followers. Her work has been featured on Refinery29 and in the New York Times and Philippine Star. Her first cookbook, The Anime Chef Cookbook: 75 Iconic Dishes from Your Favorite Anime, made the Globe & Mail’s best-seller list.
Lucía Estrada
Lucía Estrada is a Colombian poet and the author of seven collections of poetry. She has won numerous local and national awards, including the National Poetry Prize for her most recent collection, Katábasis. Her work has appeared in a variety of national and international publications and has been translated into English, French, Japanese, Greek, Swedish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. Eulalia Books will be publishing a bilingual edition of Katábasis later this year.
Ashur Etwebi
Ashur Etwebi was born in 1952 in Libya. Since December 2014, he has been living in Norway after he was attacked by extremists and his house in Tripoli was burned down. He is one of Libya’s leading poets and is also an editor, translator, and painter.
Photo by Mike Brooks, Dallas Observerdiv>Will Evans
Will Evans is an award-winning publisher, writer, translator, bookstore owner, professor, and literary arts advocate. In 2013 he founded Deep Vellum, a nonprofit publishing house and bookstore dedicated to bringing the world into conversation through literature. He was awarded CLMP’s Golden Colophon Award for Paradigm Independent Publishing in 2019, was accepted to the Texas Institute of Letters in 2022, became a Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities & Culture in 2023, and was knighted by France as a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters in 2024. He teaches courses on publishing and Russian literature at the University of Texas at Dallas and SMU. A native of Wilmington, North Carolina, he lives in East Dallas with his wife and two children.
Marjorie Evasco
Marjorie Evasco left Manila to regrow roots in her home island, Bohol, in the Central Visayas of the Philippines. She continues to write in two languages, Binisaya and English, care for a garden, and plant trees. She’s committed to work for literary and cultural development and teaches graduate school.
Brian Evenson
Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses. His translations from the French include books by David B., Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Jacques Jouet, and others. He teaches in the Critical Studies program at CalArts.
Elisabeth Eybers
Elisabeth Eybers (1915–2007) was the first woman to publish a volume of poetry in Afrikaans in 1936. She emigrated to the Netherlands in 1961, where she continued to write in Afrikaans, publishing twenty-one collections of poetry during her lifetime.
Photo by by Robert Ebsteindiv>Banning Eyre
Banning Eyre is an author, guitarist, photographer, and producer. He has written about international music, especially African music, since 1988 and has long served as lead producer for the syndicated, Peabody Award–winning public radio program Afropop Worldwide. He has also contributed to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and to many other publications.
Elnaz Eyvaz
Born in Baku in 1976, Elnaz Eyvaz is a secondary school literature teacher and works for the Azerbaijan State Television and Radio Company. She has published two books of poetry (It Is Good That I Can Write and A Man’s Confession) and was a nominee for the 2011 Nasimi Prize for Literature.
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He was named runner-up in the Sparks Poetry Competition, Memorial University, Canada (2023). He has won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize, the Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize (EOPP), and the 2022 Special ANMIG poetry prize, organized by the Centro Giovanni e Poesia di Truiggio, Italy. In 2023 he was shortlisted for the Writivism Poetry Prize, the Alpine Poetry Fellowship, and named runner-up in the African and Africa American Studies Program hosted by UNL’s Institute for Ethnic Studies. His full-length poetry manuscript, The Naming, is coming out in fall 2025 via APBF from the University of Nebraska Press. His works have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Oxford Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Frontier, Palette, The Common, Southword Magazine, Colorado Review, Mud Season Review, Notre Dame, Anmly, The Republic, and elsewhere.
Mehrdad Fallah
Mehrdad Fallah (b. 1960) is one of the most influential Iranian poets of recent decades. The author of ten books of poetry, Fallah has also published a translation of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and a collection of critical essays on contemporary Iranian poetry.
Kit Fan
Kit Fan was born and educated in Hong Kong before moving to the UK at twenty-one. His second collection, As Slow as Possible, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, one of the Guardian’s fifty biggest books in 2018, and The Irish Times Poetry Book of the Year.
Fan Yusu
Fan Yusu came from Xiangyang City in Hubei Province. She was a member of the Picun Literature Group and attended the Writers’ Seminar organized by the Lao She Literature Academy. Currently she is the editor in chief of New Workers Literature. Once a live-in nanny, now Fan works as a janitor in Beijing.
Brian Fanelli
Brian Fanelli’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in a number of magazines and journals, most recently Oklahoma Review, Spillway, Boston Literary Magazine, Portland Review, and Third Wednesday. Fanelli is the author of one chapbook, Front Man (Big Table Publishing), and the full-length collection All That Remains, forthcoming soon from Unbound Content. Prior to working as a full-time English instructor at Lackawanna College, Fanelli worked a number of jobs, including country clerk, factory worker, and adjunct instructor. He has an MFA from Wilkes University and is currently a PhD student at SUNY Binghamton.
Nuruddin Farah
Nuruddin Farah (b. 1945) was born in the Italian-ruled southern region of Somalia, Baidoa. His mother was a traditional storyteller, and his father was a merchant who later worked for the British government as an interpreter. Farah lived in a multilingual environment and learned to speak Somali, Amharic, English, Italian, and Arabic. When he began to write, Farah chose English as the language of his works. His first novel, From A Crooked Rib (1970), depicts the authoritarian role of patriarchy in African society and earned Farah praise as a "male feminist." The publication of his second novel, A Naked Needle (1976), angered the Somalian dictatorial regime and finally forced Farah into exile after receiving death threats. Farah would not return to live in Somalia again, but his lifelong pursuit is to keep his country through his writing.
Jeanne Farewell
Jeanne Farewell is the author of six novels and the short-story collection Nantucket Snow. Also a pianist, Farewell has performed in the US, Europe, and China. She gives lecture-recitals about music and its associations with art and literature.
Mohd Farhan
Mohammad Farhan teaches English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India. He’s a regular contributor to various reputed newspapers and literary magazines including Wasafiri, among others.
