Clockwise from Top: Ama Ata Aidoo, Aracelis Girmay, Patricia Jabbeh WesleyTaking stock of the African Poetry Book Fund’s project to bring contemporary African poetry into the fol…
Essays
Photo: Miami Herald / GettyFor some years, Enrique Ferrari, known in Buenos Aires as Kike (kee-Kay), lived in the United States. His stay ended the day a traffic cop asked him for his pap…
Photo: Jason DevaunThe binaries of life bite at 3 a.m.You don’t need to fast-forward time.Envision vanishing before it happens.For those who care to lo…
Each year, writers and musicians from across the globe converge in Kosovo for the three-day Festival of Literature in Orllan, a vibrant celebration of local and international literature. Here, poe…
Isolation: Companion of Conscience, by Georgitta J. ValiyamattamIconoclast Indian novelist Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, set in the maximum city of Mumbai, is not only the f…
Migratory art refers to works that are visual (or aural) representations of the act of migration, made by immigrants. The concepts of body horror, evolution, and audio stimuli illuminate their aes…
Native Nations Rise protest. Photo by Victoria Pickering/FlickrI’m mixed but that doesn’t mean I’m mixed up—it just means my parents fell in love across a racial and cultural divide that split my bloo…
America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Current (2005), acrylic on steel, 18 x 18 in, part of the Greater Vehicle series The innovator isn’t important. It’s whoever has the watershed momen…
Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota / German / Welsh), Self-Reflection (2011), oil on canvas, 48 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist (dyaniwhitehawk.com)In Spring 1992 World Literature Today…
Remnants of an oil spill in the Niger Delta. Photo: Michael Uwemedimo / cmapping.netNiger Delta poet Ebi Yeibo’s verse lyrically engages the Nigerian nation on looming postindependence issues…
Portrait of “the master of the ghazal” Ghalib, by Urdu Shayar. Dinodia Photos / Alamy Stock PhotoPoetry is of course a universal art, but is it possible for a particular poetic form to be not only uni…
thebmag, “Another Nuclear Winter,” Dogern, Germany, December 3, 2005German writers are tackling the complex question of writing the environment in diverse narrative forms that provide a h…
An aerial view of hydraulic fracturing in progress at Jonah Field in Wyoming. Photo: Bruce Gordon / EcoflightThe growth of hydraulic fracturing has inspired a subgenre of dystopian novels envision…
Marcus Jansen, When the Cowboys Came, 2012, mixed media on canvas. llustration: Artist Rights Society, (ARS) New York VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Courtesy: Unit A Studio and Residency…
A monument featuring singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky in Podgorica, Montenegro. Photo: Nico TrinkhausNestled between Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, and Albania, Montenegro (“blac…
www.flickr.com/people/limone51After you died, I couldn’t hold a funeral, so my life became a funeral.After you were wrapped in a tarpaulin and car…
A group of women stripped naked in broad daylight to protest against the brutality of the Assam Rifles army contingent (July 2004).Braiding together an epic story and India’s ongoing supp…
Photo: Shevaun WilliamsIn 1978 Dubravka Ugrešić published her first short-story collection, A Pose for Prose. Life Is a Fairy Tale followed in 1983. The protagonists of thes…
Photo: Shevaun WilliamsMy training as a scholar of Russian literature and culture colors my readings of Dubravka Ugrešić’s work. No matter how hard I try to stop myself from reaching for parallels in…
Ellen Elias-Bursać, Dubravka Ugresšić, and Chad Post at the 2016 Neustadt Festival banquet. Photo: Jen Rickard BlairIf I had been pressed on what I knew about the Neustadt Prize before going to Oklaho…
In 1997 I was offered a job to teach English to adults in Croatia. Of course I had been following the events that had torn Yugoslavia apart between 1991 and 1995; and just as I was learning what I cou…
“One Foot Wrong” by Parée Erica. Parée Erica/FlickrAgainst the background of the Polish parliament’s consideration of a law that would effectively ban abortion and the ensuing protests, J…
Photo: Flickr.com/people/nex230Do we need a special issue devoted solely to women writers? Indeed we do. Author and translator Alison Anderson explains why.Do we still need magazines…
Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir, Snow Symbol I, 2015, 100 x 100 cm, oil on linen. Photo by Pétur Thomsen.In these philosophical meditations for a Reykjavík art exhibit, Icelandic author Oddný Eir looks int…
Alain Mabanckou. Photo by Shevaun WilliamsOn March 19, 2006, the French daily newspaper Le Monde published an article I wrote entitled “La francophonie, oui; le ghetto, non.”1 My intention wa…
