The University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of contemporary international literature and culture, World Literature Today (WLT), celebrates a hundred years of publishing this September. Featuring poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, author interviews, books reviews, and translation in a bimonthly print journal as well as online, WLT aspires to serve university, state, and international communities. Ahead of WLT’s centennial issue, Daniel Simon, who has helmed the journal as editor in chief since 2008, recently responded via e-mail to questions about how he finds new voices for the magazine and how global literature can foster empathy and cross-cultural dialogue.
As WLT marks its centennial, how are you thinking about its original mission and how that mission has evolved?
In his 1927 “Foreword to Our First Issue,” founding editor Roy Temple House doesn’t present a lofty mission so much as a utilitarian “conviction that [we] are undertaking a work which very much needed doing.” He is hopeful that Books Abroad—as the magazine was originally called—might become “a little magazine of really useful information” about books from Europe, “the South American republics, and perhaps other countries.” Even as literary modernism was flourishing, House was dismayed by the United States’ increasing political isolationism during the interwar years, especially in the notorious Immigration Act of 1924. In 2026, as we watch U.S. soft power being decimated by the Trump administration’s foreign and domestic policies, the editors of WLT are redoubling our efforts to champion a vision of global literary excellence that transcends linguistic and geographic borders.
The journal’s founding motto was “Light From Abroad.” What does that phrase mean to you now, in a moment when “abroad” can feel both closer and more contested?
“Light From Abroad” was part of a logo that included a topsail schooner silhouetted by the sun. When our name changed from Books Abroad (1927–1976) to World Literature Today (1977–present), then-editor Ivar Ivask interpreted that light as both a harbor (the magazine welcoming ships—i.e., books—from far-flung geographies) as well as a lighthouse (the magazine as a beacon for ships trying to navigate the rocky shoals of the Cold War), which, in turn, “radiates the light received back abroad.” I’d like to think that the sun in our logo is rising, not setting. To me, the lighthouse today represents an array of solar panels that reflects the radiance it receives as much as it imperially projects light.
How are you finding new voices from around the world these days? Has that process shifted in the digital era?
New voices primarily come to us through the translators who serve as cultural viaducts for the many literary works in other languages that merit an anglophone readership. The American Literary Translators Association provides exemplary service in this regard, and we sponsor two different student translation prizes to give young translators the opportunity to be recognized for their work. Individual authors, publishers, cultural ministries, scholars, and agents also bring work to our attention. Also, we keep an eye on prizes and grants for emerging writers and draw inspiration from the many magazines that share our global ethos as represented in Deep Vellum’s annual Best Literary Translation anthologies [of work that first appeared in literary magazines].
Are there particular regions, languages, or literary communities you’re especially excited to be engaging right now?
WLT has been publishing a series of essays on reading trends in various countries, including Iran, Egypt, North Korea, and Malaysia. Written by locals with insights into what is happening on the ground, these pieces provide fascinating snapshots of what it’s like to be immersed in a domestic literary culture while being open to international trends. In North Korea, for example, we learn in an essay by Immanuel Kim that “the most evident indicator of a people’s best-seller is the poor physical condition of the novel—the tattered front cover, pages falling apart,” etcetera. Independent bookstores in places like Cairo and Kuala Lumpur foster vibrant cultural communities. A flourishing symbiosis between printed books, digital editions, and online journals also exists.
What are some of the challenges in trying to curate a genuinely global literary perspective?
Even though our base in Norman, Oklahoma, has been a rich transnational crossroads of Native nations, African American homesteaders, European settlers, and more recent arrivals from the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, world literature is happening everywhere, so we rely on a wide network of colleagues and others to bring deserving work to our attention. That network includes an editorial board and contributing editors who are specialists in a variety of languages and geographies, but we are constantly discovering new writers previously unknown to us, thanks to translators and other cultural impresarios who champion work that transcends borders.
WLT has long bridged academic and general audiences. How do you think about striking that balance in what you publish?
Since WLT’s executive director, Robert Con Davis-Undiano, published his “Back to the Essay” manifesto in 2000, the editors have made a conscious effort to eschew traditional academic writing and to focus instead on writing that is open and accessible to a general audience of nonspecialists. During the past quarter century, we’ve seen our readership grow exponentially, in part because of that visionary commitment to essayistic writing, but also thanks to making WLT’s content available on digital platforms ranging from our website (worldlit.org) to such aggregators as JSTOR and Project Muse. Having recently taken a deep dive into the WLT archive, which now includes a century’s worth of material, I am constantly amazed by the rich interplay of texts written by scholars and work contributed by passionate “lay” readers and writers who wish to be part of the ongoing dialogue about world literature.
Translation has always been central to the journal. What makes a piece really “travel” across languages for you?
When I was a graduate student pursuing translation studies at Indiana University in the 1990s, I was enamored with translation theory. But when I began actively translating a francophone Caribbean writer while working on my master’s thesis, I realized that theory was of very little use when it came to wrestling with the art and craft of actual literary translation. Then when I began working in publishing in the mid-1990s, my admiration for that craft only grew as I encountered the book-length work of such translators as Carol Maier, Jordan Stump, Betsy Wing, and others. Ultimately the translated text has to stand on its own feet as an autonomous work tethered to but not beholden to the original… . Calling translators the “exemplary citizens of the republic of letters,” Aleš Debeljak writes: “No one’s human rights are curtailed in this republic, no one is discriminated against, sentenced, or erased from the register” (WLT, 2009).
For writers submitting to WLT, what tends to make a piece stand out?
In general, editors look for writing that not only speaks to their magazine’s general mission, but also engages in a lively dialogue with recent, concrete manifestations of that mission. As the editors of WLT, we try to be as catholic as possible in showcasing work that crosses boundaries of genre, language, and geography; exemplifies gender parity; and represents the best of twenty-first-century literature. That may sound like “checking boxes,” but even within those parameters, we strive to publish work that excites us in a way that brings something new to our pages, which in turn we think will resonate with readers.
At a time of rising nationalism and xenophobia, what role can world literature play in promoting empathy and cross-cultural dialogue?
To quote Aleš Debeljak again, “We can all become citizens” in the Republic of Letters. “The only condition required to obtain citizenship,” he writes in World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon (Routledge, 2023), “is a human capacity for empathy—that is, the capacity to put oneself in someone else’s shoes.” In my introduction to A Compass on the Navigable Sea (Restless Books, 2026), my edited anthology celebrating WLT’s centennial, I also draw on the work of Chinese literary scholar Zhang Longxi, who proposes a model of cosmopolitan literary citizenship that is both ethically driven and future-oriented: “Cosmopolitanism,” he writes, “means to cultivate the feeling of a shared, common humanity with strangers, foreigners, or people outside one’s own community.” Echoing Zhang, I contend that “such a model obligates us to translate what we learn and delight in into an ethical praxis that enlarges the humanity of others as much as our own. The compass [of the book’s title] is both a navigational tool and a moral instrument.” Today, living through a recurrence of what [founding editor] Roy Temple House witnessed in the mid-1920s—exacerbated by militarized ethnonationalism—cross-cultural dialogue seems more important than ever.
What can readers look forward to in the September centennial issue and related programming?
On September 17, The Art of the Literary Magazine, an exhibition of the top ten covers of WLT in the past fifty years, will open at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Norman, Oklahoma. We’re also planning an illustrated cover, a variety of marquee commissioned essays, and highlights from our first hundred years. Later that month (September 28 to September 30), we’ll also host Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah at the University of Oklahoma, who will be fêted as the twenty-ninth laureate of the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature, which WLT sponsors. During the three-day lit fest surrounding his visit, Nasrallah will give a keynote talk, and we’ll program a variety of other events with two of his principal translators as well as other participating artists and scholars. The entire festival is free and open to the public.
Serena Alagappan is a senior editor at Poets & Writers Magazine. Find her online at serenaalagappan.com.
Photo credit: A. Simon