Authors
Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.
Ruthie Jenrbekova
Ruthie Jenrbekova was born in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and graduated from the Kazakh State University as an ecologist. Since 1997, she has been involved in various literary, artistic, and curatorial activities and also works as a cultural organizer. Together with Maria Vilkovisky, she is the cofounder of the imaginary art institution krёlex zentre. Her fields of interest include performance philosophy, material semiotics, and art-based methodologies. Currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, she lives and works in Almaty and Vienna.
Sandra Jensen
Sandra Jensen has a number of short-story and flash-fiction publications in literary journals and magazines and has received a number of awards, including the 2012 bosque Fiction Competition and the J. G. Farrell Award for best novel-in-progress. Born in South Africa, Jensen has British and Canadian citizenship.
Claudia Salazar Jiménez
Claudia Salazar Jiménez’s (b. 1976, Lima) short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. Her first novel, La sangre de la aurora, was awarded the prestigious 2014 Premio Las Américas. The English translation, Blood of the Dawn, was published in 2016 by Deep Vellum to wide acclaim. She currently lives in New York City.
Cindy Jiménez-Vera
Cindy Jiménez-Vera (b. 1978, San Sebastián del Pepino) is a poet, librarian, translator, and editor. She is the author of I’ll Trade You This Island: Selected Poems / Te cambio esta isla: poemas escogidos, translated from the Spanish by Guillermo Rebollo-Gil.
Catherine John
Catherine John is an associate professor of African American and Caribbean literature in OU’s English Department. Dr. John is the author of Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing (Duke Press & UWI Press). She is also finishing up the book Diasporic Orisa: A Philosophy of Grassroots Cultural Practice and beginning work on Cyril George Bailey: The Memoir of Stationmaster and the Genealogy of a Family. She has published in film studies, gender studies, hip-hop, and classroom pedagogy. She has received three teaching awards: the Irene Rothbaum Award (2004), the Good Teaching Award (2012), and the General Education Teaching Award (2018).
Emily D. Johnson
Emily D. Johnson is the Brian and Sandra O’Brien Presidential Professor of Russian at the University of Oklahoma. She studies twentieth-century Russian literature and history and the legacy of the Stalinist labor camp system. Her most recent book is Rethinking the Gulag (Indiana University Press, 2022), which she co-edited with Alan Barenberg.
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.
Hannibal B. Johnson
Hannibal B. Johnson, a Harvard Law School graduate, is an author, attorney, consultant, and college professor. Johnson serves on the federal 400 Years of African American History Commission, where he chairs the Economics & Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. He chaired the Education Committee for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission and served as local curator of its world-class history center, Greenwood Rising. His books, including Black Wall Street 100, chronicle the African American experience in Oklahoma and its indelible impact on American history. Johnson has received numerous honors and awards for his work and community service, including a lifetime achievement award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book and induction into the Tulsa Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.
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.
Hend Jouda
Hend Jouda (b. 1983, Al-Bureij camp, Gaza) is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and songwriter. She holds a bachelor’s degree in information technology and has worked with several local radio stations. A member of the Palestinian Writers’ Union, she co-founded 28 Magazine and was its editor in chief (2014–2018). Jouda has published three poetry collections and one short-story collection.
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.
Paul Juhasz
Paul Juhasz is a two-time Pushcart-nominated author of five books. Two of his poetry collections (Ronin in 2022 and The Fires of Heraclitus in 2025) were finalists for the Oklahoma Book Award. He served as curator for the Woody Guthrie Poets from 2020 to 2024 and currently lives in Oklahoma City.
Raushan Jumaniyazova
Raushan Jumaniyazova is a musicologist and researcher whose work investigates traditional and experimental musical cultures of Central Asia. A 2019 Fulbright Scholar (UCSC), she also curates art projects and contributes to academic and cultural discourse across media platforms.
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.
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.
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.
