Eloghosa Osunde and Okwiri Oduor. Photo of Oduor by Chelsea Bieker.
It’s hard to argue with Booker Prize–winning author Damon Galgut’s assertion that 2021 was “a great year for Afric…
Interviews
April 21, 2022
April 11, 2022Lisa Bird-Wilson is a Saskatchewan Métis and Cree writer and activist. Her debut novel, Probably Ruby (Hogarth / Penguin Random House), will be published in April 2022 in the US, fo…
April 4, 2022Sandra Cisneros’s success as a poet, short-story writer, novelist, and essayist is tied to her determination to write about others with awareness and love. Her work is populated by powerful…
March 30, 2022Photo by Lee LeFever / Flickr With student participants Leila Bagenstos, Sophia Cunningham, Cassy Fantini, Isolde Gerosa, Jae Tak Kim, and Grace Sewell Until recently, poet Julia Ne…
February 16, 2022Comma House. Photo by Tom Little Tuhin Das is a Bengali poet, essayist, activist, and short-story writer. Currently a writer-in-residence of City of Asylum Pittsburgh, he…
February 15, 2022Julie Otsuka / Photo © Jean-Luc Bertini With the 2022 publication of The Swimmers (Knopf), Julie Otsuka has moved into more personal territory, drawing on her experience as a daughte…
February 14, 2022For many years, better opportunities on foreign shores, political turmoil, and the Maoist insurgency in Nepal have contributed to a large-scale migration to foreign countries. Many Nepalese writers,…
February 9, 2022When Don Evans, the founding executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, contacted me in August 2019 to contribute a piece for the program that honored Sterling Plumpp with the Fuller A…
February 8, 2022The creative writing of the twenty-first century will be remembered for having sanctioned the passage of text from paper to digital support. But is it really true that the author’s cards have disapp…
January 20, 2022Weina Dai Randel burst onto the literary scene a number of years ago with her duology about Empress Wu Zetian, China’s first woman leader. After winning the prestigious Rita Award in 2017 an…
January 5, 2022Victoria Chang’s new collection, Dear Memory, expands the field of the memoir for readers to explore a full-color archive of family photos and historical documents collaged between…
December 1, 2021Photo by Diane Picchiottino / Unsplash That Famous Abyss (Wunderkammer, 2020) is a book of exclusive interviews with Enrique Vila-Matas by cultural journalist Anna María Iglesia,…
November 15, 2021Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s astonishing debut novel, The House of Rust, winner of the inaugural Graywolf Press Africa Prize, arrived in October as if on a magical wave, imbued wi…
October 7, 2021Photo by Kari Gunter-Seymour / www.karigunterseymourpoet.com Kari Gunter-Seymour (b. 1955) is having a moment—soon to become two years of moments since she was appointed…
October 6, 2021Denise Duong is a Vietnamese American artist whose artwork appears on the cover of the Autumn 2021 issue of World Literature Today. Her paintings, drawings, and murals…
October 4, 2021Dimitris Lyacos with Marsias / Photo by Walter Melcher In 2019 I interviewed Dimitris Lyacos on the occasion of the US tour/launch of his trilogy, Poena Damni, which had been rec…
September 15, 2021As a longtime admirer of Chase Twichell’s powerfully spare poetry that combines the wisdom of her Zen practice with her sharp perspicacity for ordinary things, I have wanted to engage in a convers…
August 9, 2021Emilio Fraia’s Sevastopol, out this summer from New Directions, is the sort of book that beguiles and dazzles in equal measure. Consisting of three disparate stories—of a…
June 28, 2021Earlier this spring, the editors of WLT invited twenty-one writers to nominate a single book, published since the year 2000, that has had a major influence on their own work, along with…
June 2, 2021Photo by Oluwaseyi Johnson / Unsplash I was lucky to meet Romalyn Ante when I was invited to read at a virtual event organized by R. A. Villanueva and hosted by Books Are Magic in August…
May 18, 2021Photo of Sulaiman Addonia by Alexander Meeus. For me, one of the most astounding books of this past year—which may have slipped your attention due to the pandemic—was Silence Is My M…
May 12, 2021Since 2015, award-winning Restless Books publisher Ilan Stavans has been immersed in bringing the literary classics to new audiences through Restless Classics. These editions come with introductions…
April 21, 2021Photo © Matika Wilbur For the 44th Annual Writers Week, the University of California, Riverside Department of Creative Writing, in partnership with the LA Revi…
April 13, 2021Juan Felipe Herrera / © UC Riverside / Courtesy of Blue Flower Arts For the 44th Annual Writers Week, the University of California, Riverside department of Creative Writ…
April 6, 2021Rita Dove / Photo © Fred Viebahn / Courtesy of UCR Writers Week 2021 For the 44th Annual Writers Week, the University of California, Riverside Department of Creativ…
Recent Posts
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In “crying out in his vindictive disarray, proclaiming that he has been, if not wayward, at least unassimilable…
Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (2004) transcended cultural boundaries to become a global environmental parable. This essay explores the…
Photo by Heiko / Stock.adobe.com
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it…
The year 2025 has been a remarkable one for French writer Marc Alyn (b. 1937). First, La Rumeur libre published his three-volume collected works…
Not nearly enough writers are translators, but all translators are writers. (And novelists and poets and essayists and playwrights and memoirists.)…
