Leonidas Donskis

Elected a member of the European Parliament in 2009, Leonidas Donskis is a philosopher, political theorist, historian of ideas, social analyst, and political commentator. As a public figure in Lithuania, he also acts as a defender of human rights and civil liberties. Born on August 13, 1962, in Klaipeda, Lithuania, Donskis received his first doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vilnius, and later earned his second doctorate in social and moral philosophy from the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Hélène Dorion

Hélène Dorion (b. 1958) is a Canadian poet, essayist, and novelist. Some of her recent awards include being named Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Québec and being a finalist for the Prix du livre jeunesse des bibliothèques de Montréal for The Cradled Life.

Madeleine Dorst

Madeleine Dorst is an intern at WLT and an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma studying English writing and nonprofit administration. In her free time, she enjoys watching movies, playing board games, and long, meandering walks.

Sébastien Doubinsky

Sébastien Doubinsky (b. 1963) is a French writer, translator, poet, and editor. He writes in both French and English and has published novels in both languages, as well as three novels in Danish.

Marcia Douglas

Marcia Douglas is the author of the novels The Marvellous Equations of the Dread, Madam Fate, and Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells as well as a poetry collection, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom. Her awards include an NEA Fellowship and a UK Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Marvellous Equations of the Dread was longlisted for a 2016 Republic of Consciousness Prize and a 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Madison Doyle

Madison Doyle is a senior with degrees in linguistics and international security studies and minors in Spanish and Arabic. While she calls Texas home, Spain has her heart. She fell in love with Valencia while studying abroad and hopes to return soon to teach English. Ultimately, she hopes to pursue a career that allows her to pursue her love of languages and literature, wherever that may take her.

Jennifer Doyle

Jennifer Doyle is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches gender studies, visual culture, and American literature. She is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2006) and Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (forthcoming from Duke University Press). She writes a feminist soccer blog, From a Left Wing (fromaleftwing.blogspot.com), and is working on a book about art and sport, tentatively titled The Athletic Gesture.

Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble (b. 1939) is an English novelist, biographer, and critic. She has published 17 novels, and in 2011, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award.

[Photo by Chris Boland]

Nataša Dragnić

Nataša Dragnić (b. 1965) is a Croatian writer and poet. She currently lives in Germany where she works as a foreign language instructor.

Emil Draitser

Emil Draitser’s work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. The most recent of his twelve books of artistic and scholarly prose are In the Jaws of the Crocodile: A Soviet Memoir; Farewell, Mama Odessa: A Novel; and Stalin’s Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB’s Most Daring Operative. A three-time recipient of grants from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, Draitser currently teaches Russian at Hunter College in NYC.

Boris Dralyuk

Boris Dralyuk has translated and co-translated several volumes of poetry and prose from Russian and Polish, including, most recently, Dariusz Sośnicki’s The World Shared (BOA, 2014), with Piotr Florczyk, and Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (Pushkin Press, 2015) and Odessa Stories (Pushkin Press, 2016). He received first prize in the 2011 Compass translation competition and, with Irina Mashinski, first prize in the 2012 Brodsky/Spender translation competition. He is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015) and the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016).

Jim Drummond

Jim Drummond is a lawyer and writer in Round Rock, Texas.

Žydrūnas Drungilas

Žydrūnas Drungilas did his graduate studies at Klaipeda University in Lithuania and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is currently editor of the weekly cultural journal Šiaurės Atėnai in Vilnius, Lithuania. Between rare but memorable visits to literary salons, he has been seen wandering the streets of Vilnius in a state best described as inscrutable.

Zoran Drvenkar

Zoran Drvenkar (b. 1967) is a Croatian German novelist. His novel Sorry won the Friedrich-Glauser Prize in 2010.

Du Ya

Du Ya was born in 1968 in Henan Province. Before becoming an editor and writer, she worked as a nurse for ten years. She is the author of The Wind Uses Its Bright Wings (1998), Selected Poems (2008), and Sunset and Dawn Light (2016), which won the prestigious Lu Xun Prize.

Andrew DuBois

Andrew DuBois is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto. The author of Ashbery’s Forms of Attention, he is co-editor of The Anthology of Rap and Close Reading: The Reader.

Dora Dukova

Dora Dukova lives in Odesa, where she is an assistant editor in chief at Odesa Evening News.

Carolyn M. Dunn

Carolyn M. Dunn is an associate vice provost of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion and associate professor of English at Central Michigan University, co-editor of The Journal of Louisiana Creole Studies, and part of the NAMMY award-winning all-women’s drum group The Mankillers. Her poetry books include Outfoxing Coyote (2002), Echolocation: Poems Indian Country, LA (2014), and Stains of Burden and Dumb Luck (forthcoming). She is also the author of the much lauded play, The Frybread Queen. 

Duo Duo 多多

Duo Duo 多多 (b. 1951) is the pen name of Li Shizheng, who was born in Beijing in 1951. He started writing poetry in the early 1970s as a youth during the isolated, midnight hours of the Cultural Revolution, and many of his early poems critiqued the Cultural Revolution from an insider's point of view in a highly sophisticated, original style. Often considered part of the "Misty" school of contemporary Chinese poetry, he nevertheless kept a cautious distance from any literary trends or labeling.

After witnessing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Duo Duo left China and did not return for more than a decade. Upon his return to China in 2004, the literary community received him with honor and praise. Duo Duo currently teaches at Hainan University and divides his time between Hainan and Beijing. His translations into English include the verse collections Looking Out from Death: From the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square (1989) and The Boy Who Catches Wasps (2002) as well as Snow Plain (2010), a recent collection of short stories. Duo Duo is the twenty-first laureate of the Neustadt Prize and the first Chinese recipient of the award.

Read Duo Duo's 2010 Neustadt Prize acceptance speech and three of his poems in bilingual texts.

Rocío Durán-Barba

The author of over seventy books and recipient of numerous awards in France and internationally, Rocío Durán-Barba is a Franco-Ecuadorian writer, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter. According to Claude Couffon, she wields “one of the most remarkable pens in the universe of Latin American literature.” Durán-Barba directs the Cultural Foundation RDB in Ecuador and the association Lettres en Vol in Paris.

Eïrïc R. Durändal-Stormcrow

Eïrïc R. Durändal-Stormcrow (born David Caleb Acevedo, 1980, San Juan) is a writer and visual artist. He has published the novels El Oneronauta and Historias para pasar el fin del mundo; the sex memoirs Diario de una puta humilde; the travel book Crónicas del esmog; three short-story collections; three poetry collections; and the anthologies Los otros cuerpos: antología de literatura gay, lésbica y queer desde Puerto Rico y su diáspora (co-edited with Moisés Agosto-Rosario and Luis Negrón) and Felina: antología para gatos (co-edited with Cindy Jiménez Vera).

Marguerite Duras

One of France’s most celebrated writers, Marguerite Duras published L’Amant in 1984. It won the Prix Goncourt, and Barbara Bray’s English translation, The Lover, was published in 1985.

Lucy Durneen

Lucy Durneen (lucydurneen.co.uk) lectures in English and creative writing at Plymouth University, UK, and is assistant editor of Short Fiction. She has published stories in various literary journals, been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and highly commended in the Manchester Fiction Prize, and recently completed her first collection of short stories.

Puneet Dutt

Puneet Dutt’s (puneetdutt.com) chapbook PTSD south beach (Grey Borders Books) was a finalist for the 2016 Breitling Prize. She lives in Toronto, where she is an editorial board member at Canthius and a workshop facilitator with the Toronto Writers Collective. Her debut collection is forthcoming with Mansfield Press in fall 2017.

Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, a former actress and a former psychiatrist, are co-authors of thirty-three novels and numerous short stories and screenplays. They were born in Ukraine and eventually moved to the United States. Their books have been translated into several foreign languages and awarded multiple literary and film prizes. Marina and Sergey are the recipients of the Award for Best Authors (Eurocon 2005), Prix Planète SF des blogueurs (2020), and Rosetta Science Fiction and Fantasy Award for Best Translated Work, long form (2021). After Sergey’s death in May 2022, Marina continues to work on the novels they planned to write. Her immediate plans include finishing the Vita Nostra trilogy.