Zong! is a problem, a provocation, a persistence on the edge of an abyss. Fifteen years after its original publication, Zong! has been republished by Graywolf Press, with a new prefa…

Farah accepted the Neustadt Prize at the University of Oklahoma in October 1998 / Photo by Gil JainToday (November 24) marks the seventy-fifth birthday of Somali writer Nuruddin Farah, recipient…

Detail of a Cowlitz artist’s Large Coiled Gathering Basket, ca. 1900, cedar root and beargrass, Elizabeth Cole Butler Collection, Portland Art Museum, 2012.97.11 In spring 2020 I had the opportunity…

John Ciardi, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Luciano Rebay, and Ivar Ivask after presentation of the award certificate, Norman, Oklahoma, March 14, 1970 / Photo by Jim Lucas Today (June 1) marks the fiftieth…

Fifty years ago this week, Books Abroad editor Ivar Ivask traveled to Menton, France, to announce the establishment of the Books Abroad International Prize for Literature, the forerunner…

The Seer, by Maia Cruz Palileo   The March issue of World Literature Today is my first foray into my new role as art director at WLT, and I could not have asked for a bette…

Karen Wild Díaz / courtesy of Actionyes.org Last fall I finished translating a full-length manuscript by Karen Wild Díaz, the Uruguayan poet I’ve had the pleasure of working with since the American L…

Zofia and Kazimierz Romanowicz in front of the Galerie Lambert in 1962 / Courtesy of the Archiwum Emigracji, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Toruń, Poland For more, read these four poems by Zo…

Mario Vargas Llosa / Courtesy of Expansión To celebrate the eightieth birthday of 2004 Neustadt Prize nominee and 1977 Puterbaugh Fellow Mari…

Victor Pelevin is one of the most interesting writers to have come out of contemporary Russia. Though not widely known in the West, Pelevin is a cultural phenomenon in his native land; his work is rea…

As a longtime practitioner of the art of fiction writing and a committed reader of the works of others, I have been thinking a great deal about the impact of the proliferating film/TV industry on the…

This piece appears in Music & Literature no. 6, which includes 100 pages of new literature on and by Dubravka Ugrešić. Ugrešić was announced as the winner of the 2016 Neustadt Int…

Todd Stewart, Placing Memory: A Photographic Exploration of Japanese American Internment (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008). By permission of the photographer. On February 19, 1942, Preside…

In WLT’s May 2014 issue, I was especially intrigued by the article on Mass Reading Events (MREs) by Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. In 2010 I attended a marathon reading of Frederic T…

From the poets of princes known as Beirdd y Tywysogion to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” the history, mythology, and landscape of Wales—and her border collies—have inspired generati…

“Dogs bark,” writes Warren Motte, “for the same reasons that I write: it’s our way of coming to terms with things, gropingly, imprecisely, and as best we can.”  Photo: Thomas Hawk/Flickr I h…

Emily Johnson, Associate Professor of Russian in the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Modern Languages, Literatures & Linguistics, is a longtime contributing editor to Wor…

Photo Joe Gratz/Flickr As a criminal defense lawyer with a sometime focus on capital defense who has published fiction and poetry, your issue focused on law-inspired literature was particularly grati…

Reading the portfolio of law-inspired literature in WLT's November/December 2012 issue, I found myself lingering over not only the contents, but that little string of characters on the cover…

  Going behind the scenes of WLT’s September issue, poet, translator, and documentary filmmaker David Shook talks with Brian Hewes about making his new documentary, Kilometer Zero,…

Photo by Michael McKelvaney/Flickr I read Robert Shapard’s remarks about “flash” fiction in the September 2012 issue of WLT with a great deal of interest. Having spent quite a bit of time in…