Authors
Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.
C. K. Williams
C. K. Williams (born Charles Kenneth Williams on November 2, 1936) is an American poet, critic and translator. Williams has won nearly every major poetry award. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the National Book Award, 2003 and in 2005 Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. The 2012 film Tar related aspects of Williams' life using his poetry.
Sara Wilson
A WLT intern, Sara Wilson is earning a master’s in literary and cultural studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her interests are postmodern and contemporary American fiction and poetry.
Violet Wilson
Violet Wilson is an intern at World Literature Today. She is also an exchange student from England, where she studies American literature and creative writing.
Harmen Wind
Harmen Wind (1945-2010) was a Dutch poet and writer.
Tanaya Winder
Tanaya Winder is an entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and performance poet from the Southern Ute, Duckwater Shoshone, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Nations. She graduated from Stanford University, and her first book, Words Like Love, was published in 2015. Tanaya founded Dream Warriors, an Indigenous artist management company.
Peyton Winter
Peyton Winter is a senior at the University of Oklahoma pursuing a bachelor’s degree in advertising with a minor in editing and publishing. In addition to interning with World Literature Today, she works with Brandlink Media and The Brides of Oklahoma.
Virginia Euwer Wolff
Virginia Euwer Wolff was born in 1937 in Oregon. After graduating from Smith College, she taught school, reared two children, and attended graduate school in four states before beginning to write for young readers in her mid-forties. Her novels focus on a learning-disabled sixteen-year-old boy (Probably Still Nick Swansen, 1988); twelve-year-old violinist Allegra Leah Shapiro (The Mozart Season, 1991); two sixth-grade softball teams in 1949 (Bat 6, 1998); and an unmarried teen mother, her two children, and their babysitter (Make Lemonade, 1993; True Believer, 2001; and This Full House, 2009).
Wolff has won the National Book Award, the Jane Addams Peace Award and Honor, two Golden Kites, the Michael L. Printz Honor, two Oregon Book Awards, and, most recently, the Phoenix Book Award from the Children's Literature Association.
She has lived in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., but now reads, writes, and plays chamber music in Oregon.
Photo by Bonnie Perkinsondiv>Sholeh Wolpé
Sholeh Wolpé (www.sholehwolpe.com) was born in Iran and has lived in Trinidad, UK, and the United States. About her poems, the Poetry Foundation writes, “Wolpé’s concise, unflinching, and often wry free verse explores violence, culture, and gender.” A recipient of the 2014 PEN Heim, 2013 Midwest Book Award, 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation prize, among others, her publications include four collections of poetry, a play, three books of translations, and three anthologies. Her translation of The Conference of the Birds (Norton, 2017) has been hailed by Reza Aslan as “timeless as the masterpiece itself.” Wolpé’s writings have been translated into eleven languages.
Photo by Nitch Photographydiv>Alison Wong
Alison Wong is a fourth-generation New Zealander living in Geelong, Australia. Her poetry collection, Cup, was shortlisted for Best First Book for Poetry at the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and her poetry was selected for Best New Zealand Poems 2006, 2007, and 2015. Her novel, As the Earth Turns Silver, won the 2010 New Zealand Post Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2010 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. She is working on another novel and a memoir about New Zealand, Australia, and China.
Photo: Tai Ngai Lungdiv>Jennifer Wong
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Jennifer Wong studied English at Oxford University and has a creative writing PhD from Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of Goldfish (2013) and teaches part-time at City Lit and Oxford Brookes.
Wong Yi
Wong Yi is an award-winning Hong Kong writer, librettist, founding member of the Xi Xi Foundation, and former editor at Fleur des Lettres. She is the author of four short-story collections: Ways to Love in a Crowded City, The Four Seasons of Lam Yip, Patched Up, and News Stories. She participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2023.
Karenne Wood
Karenne Wood, an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation, holds an MFA in poetry and a PhD in linguistic anthropology. She is the author of two poetry collections, Markings on Earth (2000) and Weaving the Boundary (2016). Her poems have appeared in such journals as the Kenyon Review, Orion, and Shenandoah.
Angus Woodward
Angus Woodward’s books of fiction are Down at the End of the River, Americanisation, and Oily. His recent work in graphic memoir appears in Shenandoah, Split Rock Review, Lumina, and Slag Glass City, among others, and is currently being serialized by Hobart. Angus lives, writes, illustrates, and teaches in Baton Rouge.
Jordan Woodward
Jordan Woodward is a master’s student in English specializing in composition, rhetoric, and literacy at the University of Oklahoma. In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, exploring nature, and riding her bicycle.
Grady C. Wray
Grady C. Wray is an associate professor of Latin American literature and Spanish at the University of Oklahoma. His major investigatory focus concerns Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and other early-modern Hispanic women writers. Recently he has taken on several translation projects of contemporary poetry and fiction.
Jay Wright
From his initial appearance in the Langston Hughes–edited anthology New Negro Poets U.S.A. (1964), Jay Wright (b. 1935, Albuquerque) has published fourteen volumes of poetry and been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the American Book Award, and Yale’s Bollingen Prize. Key works include Transfigurations: Collected Poems (2000) and The Guide Signs (2007), both from LSU Press. His collection Boleros was translated into Spanish and published by the University of Veracruz in 2005.
Photo by David Shankbonediv>C. D. Wright
Carolyn D. "C. D." Wright (born January 6, 1949) is an American poet.
Photo by Taylor Slifkodiv>Amy Wright
Amy Wright is the author of Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round (2021) as well as three poetry books and six chapbooks. She has received two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her essays and poems appear in Fourth Genre, Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.
Christiane Wyrwa
Christiane Wyrwa studied German and English literature at Göttingen, Durham GB, and Berlin, where she took a PhD in 1981. With her husband, Matthias Klein, she edited Kuno Raeber’s Collected Works in seven volumes from 2002 to 2010.
Xi Xi
Xi Xi (the pen name of Cheung Yin) has written more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. One of Hong Kong’s most beloved and prolific authors, she has won numerous international awards, most recently the 2019 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature.
Xiao An
Xiao An (b. 1964) is often regarded as a “poet’s poet” in China. One of the few women in the experimental poetry group feifei, meaning “neither/nor,” she has been working as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital for twenty years while steadily publishing poetry. Her writing is influenced by classical Chinese poetry but has a contemporary feel in its themes and sensibility.
Xiao Hai
Xiao Hai (b. 1987) was born in Shangqiu City in Henan Province in China, the hometown of the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi. He has spent many years living in different cities as a migrant worker and composed over five hundred poems. After encountering Picun, an urban village outside of Beijing, he became a member of the Picun Literature Group and won the Best Poet prize at the First Laborers’ Literature Awards.
PHOTO: Paul Hiltondiv>Xu Xi
Xu Xi (@xuxiwriter) is the author of fourteen books, most recently This Fish Is Fowl: Essays of Being (2019). An Indonesian-Chinese-American diehard transnational, she splits her life, unevenly, between the state of New York and the rest of the world.
Yan Lu
Yan Lu is an associate professor in the Department of French and Asian Studies and coordinator of the Chinese Program at Huron University College, Western University, Ontario. She received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Toronto. Her current research focuses on contemporary Chinese immigrant literature in Canada.
Min Yang
Min Yang is an assistant professor of Chinese Studies, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Bowling Green State University. Her research interests include trauma studies, contemporary Chinese literature, and visual culture.
Oksana Yefimenko
Oksana Yefimenko is a Ukrainian poet and literary translator whose work has appeared in Frontier, an anthology of modern Ukrainian poetry (Glagoslav, 2017).
Yi Sha
Yi Sha, born in Chengdu in 1966, is considered one of China’s foremost avant-garde writers. He has published over twenty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; his influential online column, New Century Poetry Canon, recommends a poem a day to a wide readership throughout the Chinese-speaking world.
Hülya Yıldız
Hülya Yıldız is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara.
Man-Fung Yip
Man-Fung Yip is assistant professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He has recently completed a book manuscript entitled Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity: Aesthetics, Representation, Circulation.
Pagination