Authors
Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.
Chris Abani
Chris Abani’s books of fiction include The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song for Night, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, Graceland, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections are Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me the Sun: Collected Long Poems, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne’s Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the Hurston Wright Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honors. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Romanian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bosnian, and Serbian. His interview with Rob Roensch and Mary B. Gray appeared in the July 2018 issue of WLT.
Ibrahim Abdel Meguid
Ibrahim Abdel Meguid is an award-winning Egyptian novelist and author. He was born in Alexandria in 1946 and studied philosophy at Alexandria University. He obtained his BA in 1973 and moved to Cairo the following year. He published his first novel around the same time. Among his best known works are Birds of Amber, No One Sleeps in Alexandria and The Other Place. These have been translated into English and French. Abdel Meguid won the inaugural Naguib Mahfouz Medal for The Other Place.
Shamshad Abdullaev
Shamshad Abdullaev (b. 1957) is the leading poet of the “Fergana School.” He was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize for poetry (1994), the Russian Prize of the Boris Yeltsin Center (2006; also short-listed in 2014), and a residency at the American Academy in Rome by the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund (2015). Other translations of Abdullaev’s work by Alex Cigale have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Literary Imagination, The Manhattan Review, St. Petersburg Review, TriQuarterly, and Words Without Borders.
George Abraham
George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet. He is the author of Birthright (Button Poetry)—a finalist for the Big Other Book Award—and a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers (rawi). A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard University, Abraham lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he teaches at Emerson College.
Photo by Stuart C. Shapirodiv>Chinua Achebe
Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe is best known for his first novel and magnum opus Things Fall Apart (1958). Achebe was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1994 and 2004, and he was a Neustadt Prize jury member in 1974.
Santiago Acosta
A Venezuelan scholar and poet, Santiago Acosta is assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. His poetry collection El próximo desierto won the III José Emilio Pacheco Literature Prize “Ciudad y Naturaleza.” Acosta’s poetry has received the support of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, and he was an invited poet at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow.
Bayleigh Acosta
Bayleigh Acosta is an undergraduate student pursuing a degree in English writing at the University of Oklahoma. She is a huge fan of YA novels and particularly enjoys coming-of-age literature. She also has interests in film and media and spends a lot of free time watching movies—especially romantic comedies and dramas.
Nicole Adair
Nicole Adair has been a poetry writing fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently completing a PhD in comparative literature at UC Berkeley as well as a concurrent MA in English and creative writing.
Lami C. Adama
Lami C. Adama received her PhD in English from Texas A&M University in 2016. A poet, Lami’s writing reflects her Igala kingdom background. She has written and published articles on Shakespeare, African postcolonial literature, and ecocriticism. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Texas College in Tyler.
Colin Adams
Colin Adams is the Thomas T. Read Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, where he has taught since 1985.
Ellen Adams
Ellen Adams writes essays, fiction, and folk-country music. Her prose appears in Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review, and Kenyon Review Online and has been listed as notable in Best American Essays. Originally from Washington State, she now lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), where she’s writing new songs, developing a novel, and revising a nonfiction book.
Mary E. Adams
Mary Adams is an associate professor of English at University of Louisiana Monroe, where she teaches courses in world literature and composition.
Photo by Shilpi Sunejadiv>D. M. Aderibigbe
D. M. Aderibigbe is from the Ikorodu district of Lagos, Nigeria. His first book, How the End First Showed, was selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil for the 2018 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press in fall 2018. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The Poetry Review, jubilat, New American Writing, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from the James Merrill House, Banff, OMI International Arts Center, Ucross Foundation, Jentel Foundation, and Boston University where he received his MFA in creative writing as a BU fellow and also received a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. This fall he will begin a PhD at Florida State University, Tallahassee.
Warren Adler
Warren Adler has just launched Writers of the World, an online community for writers to share their stories about why they began writing. Warren Adler's forthcoming novel, Torture Man, which explores terrorism, is slated to be released on December 1st. His Film/TV projects currently in development include the Hollywood sequel to The War of the Roses - The Children of the Roses, along with other projects including Capitol Crimes, a television series based on Warren Adler’s Fiona Fitzgerald mystery novels, as well as a feature film based on Warren Adler and James Humes’s WWII thriller, Target Churchill, in association with Myles Nestel and Lisa Wilson of The Solution Entertainment Group. Explore more at www.warrenadler.com.
Anastasia Afanasieva
Anastasia Afanasieva was born in Kharkiv, worked as a doctor, and owns a bait manufacturing business. She is the author of five books of poems and has received several literary prizes.
Niyi Afolabi
Niyi Afolabi teaches Luso-Brazilian literature, Yoruba, and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Golden Cage: Regeneration in Lusophone African Literature and Culture and editor of The Afro-Brazilian Mind and Marvels of the African World, among others. He read this poem in honor of Mia Couto at the Neustadt banquet.
Susan Afterman
Susan Afterman was born in Australia, educated in Melbourne, and has worked as an architect in Australia, England, and Israel. Her first two collections of poetry were written in English, and her last two books were written in Hebrew. Her recent collection is Bird Bones. She lives in Clil, Israel.
Adedayo Agarau
Adedayo Agarau is an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His manuscript, The Morning the Birds Died, was a finalist for the 2021 Sillerman Prize. His chapbook, Origin of Names, was selected for New-Generation African Poets 2020 (African Poetry Book Fund). His poems have appeared in Frontier, Lolwe, Perhappenned, Boulevard, and elsewhere.
Marjorie Agosín
Marjorie Agosín is the Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American Studies at Wellesley College. She is an award-winning poet and human rights activist whose work addresses issues of social justice as well as the pursuit of memory. The United Nations honored her with a leadership award for her work in human rights. Her most recent books include Braided Memories / Memorias trenzadas and Maps of Memory.
Farah Ahamed
Farah Ahamed’s writing has been published in the White Review, Ploughshares, and Massachusetts Review, among others. Her stories were shortlisted for the 2022 Bridport and Commonwealth Prize. She is the editor of Period Matters: Menstruation Experiences in South Asia (2022). You can read more of her work at farahahamed.com.
K. Anis Ahmed
K. Anis Ahmed is the author of Good Night, Mr. Kissinger and The World in My Hands (WLT, May 2013, 49–52). He is also the publisher of the Dhaka Tribune and a co-director of the Dhaka Lit Fest.
Ashia Ajani
Ashia Ajani (they/she) is a Black queer storyteller hailing from Denver, Colorado, Queen City of the Plains. They have been published in Sierra, Them, and Foglifter, among others. They are a 2019 PEN America Writing for Justice Finalist.
Shastri Akella
Shastri Akella is a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), where he earned an MFA in writing. His thesis examines the intersection between migration and monster studies. His writing has appeared in Guernica, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and The Common, among other places.
Shaheen Akhtar
Shaheen Akhtar is the author of five collections of short stories and three novels—Palabar Path Nei (No Escape Route); Talaash (The Search); and Shokhi Rongomala. Talaash won the Best Book of the Year Award for 2004 from Prothom Alo, the largest-circulation daily newspaper in Bangladesh. The English translation of the novel was published in 2011 by Zubaan Books, Delhi, India. Akhtar has also edited the three-volume Soti O Swotontora: Bangla Shahitye Nari about the portrayal of women in Bengali literature. She currently works for Ain O Salish Kendra (ASK), a human rights / legal aid organization in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
