Authors
Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.
Nour Al Ghraowi
Nour Al Ghraowi is a Syrian writer, activist, and educator. She has received an MFA in poetry at Texas State University. Her poetry and essay have appeared in Dame Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Mizna Literary Journal, Porter House Review and others. Nour writes about social justice, migrant identity, and what it means to be an immigrant in a place far from home, and finally she writes about feminism and what it means to be a feminist Middle Eastern woman.
Nabel Al-Arini
Nabel Al-Arini is a prominent Palestinian writer, thinker, and novelist of twenty-five literary works. He has received numerous literary awards and honors. He founded the Touqan cultural project, the largest literary and intellectual cultural gathering in Palestine, which consists of a cultural center, literary salon, intellectual forum, and digital publishing imprint.
Sadaa al-Daas
Sadaa al-Daas is an award-winning Kuwaiti playwright, author, and literary critic. Her works include Li’annī aswad (2010; Because I am black) and the short-story collection Mā lā taʿrifahu ʿan al-amīrāt (2017; What you don’t know about princesses). She heads the Department of Criticism at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Kuwait.
Maram Al-Masri
A key figure in contemporary Arab poetry, Maram Al-Masri was born in Syria in 1962 and settled in France in 1982. The author of fifteen books, she has received many important literary prizes, including the Antonio Viccaro International Poetry Prize and the Dante Alighieri. In 2017 the Maram Al-Masri Prize was created, which rewards poetry and graphic works.
Mai Al-Nakib
Mai Al-Nakib is author of the novel An Unlasting Home and the award-winning short-story collection The Hidden Light of Objects. Her fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter, The First Line, After the Pause, Markaz Review, and Rowayat; her occasional essays in World Literature Today, BLARB, New Lines Magazine, and Index on Censorship, among others. She is associate professor of English and comparative literature at Kuwait University.
Montasser Al-Qaffash
Montasser Al-Qaffash has published four collections of short stories and three novels. Among other awards, in 2014 his At Eye Level was granted the Sawiris Cultural Award for best short-story collection.
Ziyad al-Qahem
Ziyad Ahmed al-Qahem lives in Sana’a, where he works as a linguist and literary editor as well as a poet. His book If the Tip of Your Dream Could Fly was awarded Yemen’s Presidential Prize for Young Authors’ Poetry in 2012. He is the author of the poetry collection Cracking the Moon (2013), and his poetic response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 was featured in the short documentary Shakespeare in Yemen (2018).
Courtesy of the Palestinian Information Center / Wikipediadiv>Refaat Alareer
Refaat Alareer (1979–2023) was a professor of world literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza and the editor of Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2013). He was killed by an IDF airstrike on December 6, 2023, along with his brother, nephew, his sister, and three of her children.
Elyas Alavi
Elyas Alavi is a poet and visual artist based in Adelaide. Born in the Daykundi province of Afghanistan, he has published three poetry books: I Am a Daydreamer Wolf, published in 2008 in Tehran (5th ed., 2016), followed by Some Wounds (Kabul, 2012) and Hodood (Tehran, 2015).
Samad Alavi
Samad Alavi is senior lecturer of Persian at the University of Oslo. He has published a number of essays and reviews in journals including WLT as well as translations of contemporary poetry from Iran.
Sandra Alcosser
Sandra Alcosser’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She was the NEA’s first Conservation Poet for the Wildlife Conservation Society and Poets House as well as Montana’s first poet laureate. She directs SDSU’s MFA and edits Poetry International.
Claribel Alegría
Claribel Alegría (b. 1924) is often considered the most important contributor to contemporary Central American literature. She was born in Estelí, Nicaragua, but spent most of her youth in the Santa Ana region of western El Salvador because of her father’s political exile. In 1943 she came to the United States to study at George Washington University, where she received her bachelors degree in philosophy and letters. She would not return to her country of origin until 1979, after the Sandinista National Liberation Front took control of the government. She is the 2006 laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Julia Alekseyeva
Julia Alekseyeva is assistant professor of English and cinema and media studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her debut nonfiction graphic novel, Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (Microcosm, 2017), won the VLA Diversity Award. She is currently working on her first academic monograph and a collection of graphic essays.
Photo by Mona Aipperspachdiv>Meena Alexander
Meena Alexander (www.meenaalexander.com), described in The Statesman (India) as “undoubtedly one of the finest poets in contemporary times,” is the author of seven books of poetry. An expanded version of Atmospheric Embroidery is forthcoming from TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press in spring 2018. A volume she edited, Name Me a Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing, will be published by Yale University Press in fall 2017. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York.
André Alexis
André Alexis is a Canadian writer who grew up in Ottawa and currently lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Cristina Alger
Cristina Alger graduated from Harvard College in 2002 and from New York University School of Law in 2007. She has worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs and as an attorney at Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale, and Dorr. She lives in New York City, where she was born and raised. The Darlings is her first novel. She is currently working on her next book.
Mayyu Ali
Mayyu Ali is a young Rohingya poet, writer, and humanitarian activist who runs the Youth Empowerment Centre in the refugee camp at Cox’s Bazaar, where approximately one million Rohingya refugees are displaced. Mayyu has written many poems and articles, mostly for rohingyablogger.com. His articles have also featured in Al Jazeera, Dhaka Tribune, and on CNN and the Financial Times. Recently he published The Blossom, including some of his early poems, distributed around the camps. His poems have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation (in a special feature on Rohingya poetry) as well as the Best English and Light of English magazines in Myanmar. His poems will appear in a pamphlet of Rohingya poetry and folk songs published by Arc Publications in July 2019.
Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali has worked as a political organizer, lobbyist, and yoga instructor. His books include two volumes of poetry, The Far Mosque and The Fortieth Day; the novels Quinn’s Passage and The Disappearance of Seth; and a book of lyric prose, Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities. He has taught writing and literature at various colleges including the Culinary Institute of America, Monroe Community College, Shippensburg University, and New York University, and currently teaches at Oberlin College and in the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program. Co-founder of the small press Nightboat Books, his poetry and essays appear widely in such journals as Atlas, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, jubilat, and in Best American Poetry 2007.
Hasan Alizadeh
Iranian poet Hasan Alizadeh was born in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad in 1947. His poem “Terraces” was featured in Poetry Daily, translated by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould. Other poems have appeared in English in West Branch, Malahat Review, and Modern Poetry in Translation. House Arrest: Poems of Hasan Alizadeh (Arc Publications, 2022) will be the first translation of his poems into English. A reading from the manuscript of House Arrest can be viewed here.
Joshua Allan
Joshua Allan works for Routledge books in Oxford, England, and writes extensively on the side. He has published in WLT, the Oxford Review of Books, Undercurrent Philosophy, Full Stop, Eunoia Review, and other magazines.
Amanda Allard
Amanda Allard is an editorial intern at Big Sky Journal in Bozeman, Montana, where she writes about art and culture in the Northern Rockies. Amanda recently graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in French literature. The Lover is her first work of translation to be published.
Photo by Meredith Mashburndiv>Erika Almenara
Erika Almenara is assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Arkansas. She received her PhD in Romance languages and literatures (Spanish) from the University of Michigan in 2015. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American cultural production, especially in the cases of subaltern/marginalized subjects and communities. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Letras Femeninas, Revista Iberoamericana, Dissidences, and Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism. Dr. Almenara’s book, The Language of the In-Between: Travestis, Post-hegemony, and Writing in Contemporary Chile and Peru, is under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press for publication in 2022. Almenara is also a published author and teaches a course called Creative Writing in Spanish, which she created in 2017.
Shir Alon
Shir Alon is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research and reviews of modern Arabic and Hebrew cultures have appeared in WLT, boundary 2, Arab Studies Journal, Comparative Literature, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other venues.
Courtesy of the University of Missouridiv>Jordi Alonso
Jordi Alonso graduated with an AB in English from Kenyon College in 2014 and was the first Turner Fellow in Poetry at Stony Brook University, where he received his MFA. He is a Gus T. Ridgel Fellow in English at the University of Missouri, where he is a PhD candidate studying the cultural transmission of nymphs and fauns in literature. His work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Noble/Gas Qtrly, Southampton Review, Levure Littéraire, and other journals. Honeyvoiced, his first book, was published by XOXOX Press in 2014, and his chapbook, The Lovers’ Phrasebook, was published by Red Flag Poetry Press in 2017.
Zeynep Alp
Zeynep Alp is a seasoned editor, translator, international copyrights manager, and curriculum developer with extensive experience spanning fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. She is currently translating Shereen Malherbe’s The Land Beneath the Light into Turkish and has previously translated Miko Peled’s The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine. Dedicated to education and cultural preservation, she is actively developing a decolonized K–12 curriculum on Palestine’s history and culture, aimed at fostering deeper understanding and empathy through storytelling and innovative pedagogy. Her work bridges literature and education, ensuring that voices from diverse cultures are amplified and shared with global audiences.
Photo by Dina Assaddiv>Shahd Alshammari
Shahd Alshammari is a Kuwaiti author, poet, and academic. She is the author of the books Notes on the Flesh and Head above Water as well as numerous other academic publications and papers. Her areas of research include gender studies, illness narratives, and disability studies.
