Authors
Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.
Quinn Carver Johnson
Quinn Carver Johnson (they/them) is the author of The Perfect Bastard (Curbstone Books, 2023), a poetry collection about gender, sexuality, class, and pro wrestling. Their work has appeared in Rappahannock Review, Right Hand Pointing, Cimarron Review, Red Earth Review, and elsewhere. Carver Johnson graduated from Hendrix College and currently lives in Tulsa, where they host the People’s Poetry reading series dedicated to protest poetics.
Dianne Johnson-Feelings
Dianne Johnson-Feelings is a professor of English at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of groundbreaking scholarship on the history of African American children’s literature and is working on a documentary film celebrating that history. As Dinah Johnson, she is the author of Black Magic (2010), Hair Dance (2007), All Around Town: The Photographs of Richard Samuel Roberts (1998), and several other books published by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers.
Julius D. Jones
Julius D. Jones is a self-taught poet and is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for a murder he says he did not commit.
Janine Joseph
Janine Joseph is the author of Driving without a License, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her libretti for the Houston Grand Opera/HGOco include What Wings They Were, “On This Muddy Water,” and From My Mother’s Mother. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oklahoma State University.
Isaac Joslin
Isaac Joslin holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota and is assistant professor of francophone studies at Arizona State University. His research in postcolonial francophone African literatures and cinemas, ecocriticism, and Afrofuturism has been published in numerous academic journals, and his first monograph, Afrofuturisms: Ecology, Humanity, and Francophone Cultural Expressions (2023), was published by Ohio University Press.
Fady Joudah
Fady Joudah’s fourth poetry collection, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in the winter of 2018. His poetry and translations have been awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, among others.
Diaa Jubaili
Diaa Jubaili (b. 1977, Basra, Iraq) is the author of eight novels and three short-story collections, including What Will We Do Without Calvino?, winner of the Tayeb Salih International Award for Creative Writing, and No Windmills in Basra. He was a contributor to the short-story collection Iraq +100 and has written for the Guardian.
Raushan Jumaniyazova
Raushan Jumaniyazova is a musicologist and art manager who writes for television and radio. Her research interests include the traditional musical culture of Kazakhstan and Central Asia, contemporary music, and cultural management. She was a 2019 Fulbright Scholar (ucsc).
Ha-yun Jung
Ha-yun Jung’s writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Best New American Voices, and other publications. Her translations include fiction by Oh Jung-hee, Kim Hoon, and Shin Kyung-sook, and Wallace Stevens’s poetry collection Harmonium, the first of his books to be made available in Korean. She is currently translating The Ninth Wave, a novel by Choi Eun-mi.
Jung Yong-jun
Korean author Jung Yong-jun began his literary career with the short story “Good Night, Oblo” (굿나잇, 오블로), for which he received the 2009 Hyundai Literature Prize for New Writers. A Walk along Seoulleung, a collection of short stories, is considered a new turning point in Jung’s world of art. His short story “Disappearing Things,” contained therein, won the Moonji Literary Award in 2019.
Photo by J. Foley Opalediv>Ismail Kadare
Ismail Kadare is Albania’s best-known poet and novelist. In 2005 he was awarded the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for “a body of work written by an author who has had a truly global impact.” He is also the recipient of the 2009 Prince of Asturias Prize in Spain, and in 2015 he won the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. Kadare was the 2020 laureate for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Photo © Wendi LaFaydiv>Mohja Kahf
Mohja Kahf’s second book of poetry, Hagar Poems, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2016. Her novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, was published in 2006. Kahf is a professor of comparative literature and Middle East studies at the University of Arkansas.
Joudie Kalla
Joudie Kalla is a chef who trained in London’s finest restaurants. She is the author of two best-selling Palestinian cookbooks, Palestine on a Plate and Baladi. Her work ranges from food consulting to philanthropy, and using her cookbooks she helped rebuild a school in Nablus for children with The House of Friendship.
Lauren Kalstad
Lauren Kalstad is a poet and author of the children’s book To the Stars in Bumper Cars. Her poetry and essays have appeared in publications including The Alarmist, Coe Review, Belleville Park Pages, Thimble Literary Magazine, Edible, and EATER. She holds an MFA from New York University and currently teaches at the University of North Texas. She lives in Dallas with her husband, daughter, and mini Aussiedoodle, Alfie.
Yalie Kamara
Yalie Kamara is a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. She is the author of A Brief Biography of My Name (2018) and When the Living Sing (2017). Kamara’s writing can be found in Poetry Daily (Poetry Society of America), Adroit, Callaloo, and elsewhere. Kamara has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series competition and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize.
Photo © Agência Paradiv>Márcia Wayna Kambeba
Márcia Kambeba, of the Omágua/Kambeba indigenous people in Brazil, is the author of Ay kakyri Tama – Eu moro na cidade (2013). She’s a writer, composer, poet, activist, photographer, performer, and public speaker on indigenous and Amazonian subjects. With a master’s degree in geography, she offers workshops and storytelling throughout Brazil and abroad.
Nour Kamel
Nour Kamel (she/they) writes and edits things in Egypt. Their chapbook Noon is part of the New-Generation African Poets series, and their writing can be found in Anomaly, Rusted Radishes, Ikhtyar, Sukoon, 20.35 Africa, Sumou, and Mizna. They helped create and facilitate writing workshops at the Contemporary Image Collective, which led to the publication of The Taste of Letters / طعم الحروف and Our Bodies Breathe Underwater / أجسادنا تتنفس تحت الماء.
Yana Kane
Yana Kane came to the United States as a refugee from the USSR. She holds a BSE from Princeton University and a PhD in statistics from Cornell University. She is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. View.Point recognized her translations as among the “Best of 2022.” She won the 2023 RHINO Poetry Translation Prize.
Han Kang
Born in South Korea in 1970, Han Kang made her literary debut as a poet in 1993. She has since published novels and short fiction and won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, the Manhae Literary Prize, and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. She currently works as a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. The Vegetarian, Deborah Smith’s English translation of one of Han Kang’s five novels, won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.
Photo: Thomas Langdondiv>Fabienne Kanor
Born in France to Caribbean parents, Fabienne Kanor teaches French and francophone literature and cinema at Penn State University. An award-winning writer and filmmaker, she has directed many movies (mostly documentaries) and published seven novels, including Faire l’aventure (2014), Je ne suis pas un homme qui pleure (2016), Louisiana(2020), and, in 2018, translated into French Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” Awarded the “Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres” by the French Ministry of Culture, Kanor devotes her career to studying race, gender, and migrations in France and francophone Africa. Her novel Humus, about fourteen enslaved African women, was published in September by University of Virginia Press.
Vikram Kapur
Vikram Kapur (www.vikramkapur.com) is the author of two novels. He has also published several short stories and pieces of nonfiction. His stories have been shortlisted in a number of international competitions. He is currently an associate professor of English at Shiv Nadar University.
Zvonko Karanović
Zvonko Karanović is a poet and fiction writer born in Niš, Serbia. Like the poets of the Beat generation he takes as his models, he has traveled widely throughout Europe, hitchhiking and often changing jobs. He has worked as a journalist, editor, radio host, DJ, concert organizer, and for thirteen years was the owner of a music store. He has published ten collections of poems and a novel trilogy, The Diary of Deserters.
