Why is it so hard to find the work of Sudanese women in English translation? Yes, there is Leila Aboulela, who writes in English, but if asked about other female Sudanese writers, one would probably struggle to name them. Some might reason that there just aren’t many Sudanese women writing. This assumption has led to anthologies and online publications focused on Sudanese literature in which female-authored works make up less than thirty percent of their contents; more general...

Our November 2020 issue, the second part of our double issue of writing on the climate crisis that began last month, coincides with an inauspicious date: as of November 4, 2020, Donald Trump has made official the United States’ breach of its commitment to the landmark 2015 Paris accord on climate change, the second time in two decades that the US agreed to and then failed to honor its commitments to an international climate pact. The protagonist of this month’s work is, by and...

As I write, the West Coast of the US is ravaged by wildfires; the Gulf Coast, still recovering from Hurricane Laura, braces for Hurricane Sally’s potential destruction; an enormous chunk of Greenland’s icecap has broken free; the Northern Hemisphere has sweated through the hottest summer on record—and that’s just today. Temperatures swing between extremes, violent weather becomes the norm. In this daunting context, we present a double issue of writing on...

Andri Snær Magnason travels to the Snæfellsjökull glacier in Iceland and contemplates environmental responsibility, collective action, and hope in the face of global warming.   In the future, glaciers will be an alien phenomenon, rare as a Bengal tiger. Having lived in the time of the white giants will become swaddled in a fairytale glow, like having stroked a dragon or handled the eggs of the great auk. Glaciers will certainly be found in the Arctic, Greenland, and...

Environmental writer Amy Brady considers the role of literature in prompting action against climate change.   In early June of 2020 the Yakutia region of Siberia hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit, causing the permafrost to melt and the dry soil beneath to burst into flames. Thick white smoke spread across the country’s green expanse, releasing more carbon emissions into the atmosphere than any other wildfire on Earth in the last two decades. These fires are a clear sign that the...

In this essay, Silvana Paternostro reflects on her time in Tokyo and the role of women in Japanese society.   When friends ask me about Tokyo, my answer takes them by surprise: I walked, mostly. I visited sites and had culinary experiences. I bathed in hot springs in the mountains of Nagano, where wild monkeys do the same. I stood close to a monk sounding the six o’clock bell by the five-story pagoda in the ancient city of Nara. But what I treasure most when I think of the four...

  This year, we partnered with the Academy of American Poets to bring you the second edition of the Poems-in-Translation Contest. We received 935 poems from 448 poets from 87 countries translated from 58 languages. The four winning poems will be published in Words Without Borders and the Academy of American Poets’s “Poem-a-Day” throughout September and into October. Published alongside the poems will be the original language texts...

The title of this issue is "Who Writes Peru: Asian Peruvian Writers.” A more precise subtitle, however, would have been "Nikkei and Tusán Peruvian Writers,” because “Asian Peruvian” as an organizing principle simply doesn’t make much sense in the home contexts of these seven writers. The term trips off my (North) American tongue because I am used to identifying myself as “Asian American.” In the US, the political movements of the 1960s...

Peruvian writer Julio Villanueva Chang profiles Lima’s oldest life drawing model in this short essay. Rodolfo Muñoz del Río has spent the better part of his life in the nude. Butt-naked. For the past half-century, students at Lima’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes have gazed upon him not as a human being, but as a configuration of shadows and proportions: a drawing condemned to sit still for seven to twelve hours a day. A sixty-six-year-old drawing whose...

This feature of Guaraní poetry is the first installment in the Words Without Borders Indigenous Writing Project. The selection criterion for the feature was simple: I sought lyric texts that made me uncertain. Discomfort and incoherence are signs of different ways of poeticizing or narrativizing the world. Peruvian literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar said of Peruvian poet César Vallejo’s work, characterized by deviations in spelling, that it is “bad...

In this essay, Poupeh Missaghi details her experience of isolation on a solitary Persian New Year as the COVID-19 pandemic swept through New York City. A few days after the new Persian year began on March 20, Dad called from Tehran. He was sobbing. “Your grandfather passed away,” he said. The first thing that struck me was his choice of “your grandfather” over “my father.” He spoke very shortly, unlike most times, when he wants to stay online even when...

In humorous and reflective brief notes, Laia Jufresa records daily life in quarantine in Edinburgh. My daughter is a doctor. A dragon doctor. I know this because she tells me every day, all day long, and has been doing so for a month, ever since the nurseries closed. Her conviction wavers only occasionally, when she asks: Mamá, where can I find a real dragon? She says this in Spanish, but puts the words “real dragon” in the English order: adjective, noun. When she...

Pride Month and our annual Queer issue arrive at a time of grief and rage. Already ravaged by the pandemic and the resulting financial devastation, the US erupted in fury over the brutal murder of George Floyd by police, protests which were soon duplicated around the world. As these three crises—health, economic, and racial justice—spur communities to take to the streets and demand action, we are reminded that Pride celebrations themselves grew out of the protests spearheaded by...

In this nonfiction excerpt, Chico Felitti tells the story of two Brazilian makeup artists who became famous for their radically altered appearances. The cemetery in São Bento, Araraquara, has a grave with no name. It’s the second tombstone in the fourth block on the left, if you walk in through the gate by the coconut-water stand. The family of the man buried there can't afford the R$140 (about $30) it takes to have a grave marker installed. But the man whose ashes rest...

In contemplative diary entries, Ricardo Romero records life in a locked-down Buenos Aires. 1. And suddenly, with the prospect of these days where the unreality of our daily lives cracks open to reveal the reality of the details (the parts, the fractions are clear but not the whole: the whole is hardly the story we need, the law of gravity that prevents our world from dispensing of us), suddenly, then, we discover that making a bed, turning on a stove, regulating the temperature of the...

Introduction: Megacity Lockdown Coronavirus has thrived in megacities, determined to make it in the big smoke of the world’s densest urban hubs. It was in industrial Wuhan, now the most infamous megacity of them all, where tightly packed tower-block residents first showed signs of a new lung infection. New York and London, superstar cities, meccas for tourists, are now epicenters not of culture but mortality. The virus spread easily on their densely packed transport networks, their...

Last spring in Mexico City seems an eternity ago. The jacarandas were blooming. Each morning I would rise early, salute the raucous purple blossoms on the tree outside the window, brew coffee, then return to bed and read, while my companion, a large, gangly, deaf white cat named Cirilo kneaded my legs. I read mostly nonfiction by Mexican women who wrote with what I came to describe as an itinerant sensibility—essays with a roving gaze whose authors travel through geographic and...

Mariana Oliver reflects on the intertwined relationship of language and migration in this essay about Turkish writer Emine Özdamar. In my language, tongue means language. The tongue does not have bones: it twists in the direction we twist it in. I sat tongue twisted in the city of Berlin. —Emine Sevgi Özdamar She moved to West Berlin at eighteen to work in one of the factories. Eyes accustomed to the colors of Istanbul; dark, thick hair. Though she wasn’t one for...

Karen Villeda tracks her journey through Eastern Europe in microessays that blend poetry and prose. Micro is the diminutive for something very small or a prefix derived from the Greek μ (mikró), meaning                         “small”:             as in microelectronics, microscope, microcast,             micrococcus,...

Writing from her cramped New York apartment, Jazmina Barrera finds solace in lighthouses, tracing their history and pondering their symbolism in this essay from her collection On Lighthouses. 44° 40’ 36.4” N 124° 4’ 45.9” W Yaquina Head Lighthouse. Brick tower painted white, 28 meters high. Original Fresnel lens, visible at 31 kilometers. Blink pattern: two seconds on, two seconds off, two seconds on, fourteen seconds off.   Yaquina Head We...