;
Activism will always be about stories, which I believe save lives. – Emily Rapp Black
WHEN THE SELF-PROCLAIMED “Indians of All Nations” occupied Alcatraz Island in November…
Daniel Simon
If one were to drive a nail through this decade, planetary history would swing in the balance. – Kathleen Dean Moore, ISLE, Winter 2014 FIVE YEARS AGO, in the headn…
April 30, 2019Garden mural from the triclinium of Livia, ca. 30–20 BC, Palazzo Massimo, Rome / Photo by Ian Scott / Flickr With the recent publication of her latest verse collection, This Bright D…
April 12, 2019The Youth Strike for Climate Protest, London, March 15, 2019 / Photo: David Holt / Flickr Looking ahead to our summer 2019 issue, with its cover focus devoted to “The Global Literature of Cli…- April 1, 2019To kick off National Poetry Month, I’d like to share with you five favorite poets/poems that have appeared in the magazine’s pages over the past five years. Zsuzsa Takács (Hungary), “On Vision” and…
What to do with the time traveler, the stranger, the alien? – Ladan Osman What do Hong Kong and Niger have in common, apart from being on opposite ends of the UN Human Development Inde…
The page is both full of death and free of it. – Edwidge Danticat “And because my mother did not write letters and because I did not ever want to forget the things I wished my mother were te…
November 16, 2018Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe / Photo by Phillip Kalantzis Cope / Flickr In the wake of the October 27 mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the…
Manuel with Alice / Courtesy of alicewalkersgarden.comIn conjunction with Erik Gleibermann’s interview with Alice Walker that headlines the November issue of World Lit…
Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and PlaceEd. Annick Smith & Susan O’ConnorMilkweed EditionsIn many of the essays and poems in this remarkable new collection, the ide…
The Student Advisory Board officers for 2018–2019 (clockwise from top): Reid Bartholomew, James Farner, Kayla Ciardi, and Abi Clarke ABOUT A DOZEN YEARS AGO, when World Literature Today fi…
. . . like a premonition of eternity. – Xavier Bordes M ost writers and—by extension—artists take the brute facts of existence as a starting point, then fashion their work with v…
That the ears might hear what the eyes can’t see.– MonchoachiFrom vinyl collections to mixtapes to digital playlists, music aficionados have always curated their favorites alongside bookshelv…
How does one become a writer? For German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, it was less epiphany than the gradual accretion of circumstance and intention. Here is what she told Haaretz in 2011: “I tur…
Not only is World Literature Today one of the oldest continuously published magazines devoted to international literature, but a remarkable continuity has prevailed on our masthead page in th…
The Art of DeathEdwidge DanticatGraywolf Press (2017)It might seem odd to focus on a book called The Art of Death as spring approaches (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), but we all know about…
Well, Lord, this / infinitesimal speckcould fill the universe with praise.– Marilyn Nelson, “The Dimensions of the Milky Way” When Marilyn Nelson delivered her keynote talk, “Bo…-
Thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.– Yehuda Bauer Just this morning, as I began drafting my note for the current…
-
The project advanced by this forum is urgent: individually and collectively to contest the pitched, pervasive, pernicious intolerance of our age.– H. L. Hix, “Belief in an Age of Intolerance”…
Harvey Dunn, I Am the Resurrection and the Life, 1926 / Courtesy South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, South DakotaFor more, read two new poems by Ted Kooser.While in Lincoln to attend the…
Every story had a face, a first and last name, a mother or son, brother or sister, losses and days of triumph.– Leonora Flis, “Zeroes”The haunting photograph on the cover of this issue, by aw…
Editor in Chief Daniel Simon picks three books that promise to unsettle, console, and inspire.Anne CarsonFloatRandom HouseI found…-
In the spring 1992 issue of World Literature Today, published to mark the quincentenary of Cristoforo Colombo’s encounter with the New World, Robert Berner writes: “The fact of the matter is…
Kim StaffordThe Flavor of Unity: Post-Election PoemsLittle Infinities, 2017 Are you dreading the future after reading all the dystopian lit in this issue, or feeling paralyzed by the gen…-
How could utopia fail? – Elizabeth Fifer, “Dead Reckoning”In László Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel, The Melancholy of Resistance—published the same year Hungarian communism collaps…
December 17, 2025
December 15, 2025
October 21, 2025
