Dereje Demissie (Ethiopia), Psychscape (2009)
There are many things I wish to tell you about the state of African literature today, but none would be able to be contained in a single issue,…
Essays
“Doctor and the Doll” by PMillera4 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Patient Message for Dr. Epstein: After an hour of pushing buttons and cursing at my keyboard, I figured out how to set up your pat…
The zhetygen is a stringed instrument of the peopoles of Central Asia and Kazakhstan Young Kazakh musicians are diversifying Kazakh music and putting an end to the previous generation’s…
DUE TO UNCERTAINTIES surrounding the Covid-19 delta variant, World Literature Today once again hosted the 2021 Neustadt Festival (October 25–27) as a 100 percent online gath…
Painting was called “silent poetry.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson Eager to emerge from isolation and encounter art and (safely) others, a writer in Florida takes in Van Gogh Alive at th…
China’s fifty-five officially recognized “minority peoples” make up less than 9 percent of the People’s Republic of China. Still, they number more than 130 million, and their literature deserves…
Photo by Christopher Assaf Monica Brown served on the jury that chose the 2021 NSK Prize winner and successfully championed Cynthia Leitich Smith as her nominee. On the final day of the 2021 Neus…
Photo by Christopher T. Assaf Let’s all take a moment to breathe in some glittering fairy dust and share a wonderful, lovely thought. Let’s contemplate the magic and power of stories and the life-cha…
Photo by Fowzia Karimi An Afghan American writer recalls her own departure from Afghanistan in 1980 and the weariness she observed on a 2015 visit back to Kabul. Now, having watched events unfold…
Poet Kali Regenvanu at the market in Port Vila Vanuatu’s fortieth independence anniversary in 2020 sparked an unprecedented literary wave of new writing. Harnessing the colonizers’ languages, as…
Life and politics are the same on an empty plate, in a body plagued by a pandemic. But in Cuba, people are rising up and challenging the regime. Here, Cuban American poet Carlos Pintado traces th…
Photo by Se Osomajtli Tsawi For Indigenous writers like Zoque poet and activist Mikeas Sánchez, language serves as a unifying element in the struggle to defend lands and life. This essay’s title…
Photo © by Yousef Khanfar For over 850 years, two Palestinian Muslim families have been entrusted with the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the holiest shrine for Christianity.…
Photo © by Yousef Khanfar In the age of globalization, Western social theories, particularly those articulating the concept of feminism, seem to have taken over the world. Today the women’s movement…
Laila Shawa, Handala / Courtesy of the artist Seventy years of Palestinian fragmentation since Israel’s creation have taken their toll. The Palestinians of today are split into different…
Sliman Mansour / Courtesy of the artist In memory, Aziz Shihab 1927–2007 In the late 1950s, in the middle of the United States (we lived in Ferguson, a quiet, leafy community barely known e…
Nabil Anani / Courtesy of the Artist It has been said, Wisdom descended into the hands of the Chinese, the brains of the Greeks, and the tongue of the Arabs. Palestinian writers, poets, and…
Marie Casimir and OU School of Dance MFA student J’aime Griffith are co-choreographing and performing in I Dream of Greenwood, with dramaturgy by Professor Leslie Kraus / Photo by…
Fan Yusu from the cover of the inaugural issue of New Workers’ Literature Fan Yusu is a migrant worker from central China. She went to Beijing to work as a live-in nanny (baomu) and late…
Practicing law in a Red Cross tent are B. C. Franklin (right) and his partner I. H. Spears with their secretary Effie Thompson on June 6, 1921, five days after the Tulsa Race Massacre / Courtesy of S…
A double exposure photo taken after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre by personnel of the American Red Cross Several recent works on the Tulsa Race Massacre add to an already rich collection of public…
Photos courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society, Ella Mahler Collection / University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, With half-shut eyes ever to see…
Alexander Tamahn, What Lies Beneath / Courtesy of the artist This year—2021—marks the hundredth anniversary of the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Will it take another hundred yea…
Since the economic reform launched in 1978, China has witnessed a vast group of rural women leaving their families behind in the countryside to enter urban middle-class homes as domestic workers.…
China’s “Battlers poetry” is written by members of the new precariat, especially rural-to-urban migrant workers. This is an exciting trend, both in its own right and when viewed as part of a mor…
December 19, 2024
December 02, 2024
