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  • O Thiam Chin

    O Thiam Chin is the author of four collections of short stories: Free-Falling Man (2006), Never Been Better (2009), Under the Sun (2010), and The Rest of Your Life and Everything That Comes with It (2011). Never Been Better was long-listed for the 2010 Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. His short stories have been featured in Asia Literary Review, Kyoto Journal, the Jakarta Post, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, QLRS, Karavan, Asia Writes, and in several anthologies. O was an honorary fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program in 2010.



  • Brenna O’Hara

    Brenna O’Hara graduated from the University of Oklahoma with degrees in English and biochemistry in 2020. She enjoys reading, volunteering, and playing in musical ensembles in her spare time. She is currently pursuing her MA in English at OU and can be found interning at World Literature Today.



  • Caitriona O'Reilly

    Caitriona O’Reilly’s first collection of poetry, The Nowhere Birds, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection and won the Rooney Prize in Irish Literature. Her second collection, The Sea Cabinet, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Literary Prize. Between 2008 and 2011 she was editor of Poetry Ireland Review, and she currently sits on the editorial board of Poetry Salzburg Review. She lives in Lincolnshire.



  • Achy Obejas

    Achy Obejas is the author of The Tower of the Antilles, which was a PEN/Faulkner finalist, and several other books of fiction. Her first full book of poetry, Boomerang, will be published by Beacon Press in a bilingual edition in 2021. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and successfully nominated Edwidge Danticat for the 2018 Neustadt Prize.



  • Dragana Obradović

    Dragana Obradović is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures at the University of Toronto. A native of Sarajevo, she received her PhD from University College London, UK. She is the author of Writing the Yugoslav Wars: Literature, Postmodernism, and the Ethics of Representation (University of Toronto Press, 2016). She has published articles on post-socialist literary poetics and contemporary feminist cinema in the Balkans. Her other academic interests include the Holocaust in Yugoslav fiction, themes of diaspora and exile, and the essay genre.


  • Biljana D. Obradović

    Biljana D. Obradović, a Serbian American poet, translator, and Professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana (New Orleans) teaches poetry writing. She has lived in Greece, India, and the former Yugoslavia before coming to the US in 1988 for graduate study. She has an MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from VCU in Richmond and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She has published three collections of poems, most recently Little Disruptions (Niš Cultural Center, 2012). She also has four books of translation into English or Serbian. She is editing a second anthology of contemporary Serbian poetry with Dubravka Djurić in which Karanović will be included.



  • Ana Ojeda

    Ana Ojeda is a writer and editor. She has published numerous books in different genres for which she has won several awards and honors that particularly note her work with rioplatense language. Her most recent novel, Vikinga Bonsái (Bonsai Viking), has received widespread critical acclaim. Her Twitter and Instagram accounts are @anaojota.



  • Edwin Okolo

    Edwin Okolo (Nigeria) seeks to explore through his fiction lived experiences that are alien to him because of his gender and race. He has written for several blogs and literary magazines including Kalahari Review, The Lonely Crowd, speculative fiction at Omenana, Sable Lit Mag, and a wildly popular webseries at TheNakedConvos.com. He is currently an editor at Stories.ng and finishing his first novel.



  • Ogaga Okuyade

    Ogaga Okuyade is associate professor and currently chair, Department of English and Literary Studies, Niger Delta University, Wilberforce Island, Bayelsa State, Nigeria. His recently edited books include Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes (2013) and Between the Crown and the Muse: Poetry, Politics and Environmentalism of Christian Otobotekere (2015).



  • Bel Olid

    Bel Olid is a Catalan writer, translator, and professor. Through her writing and activism, she portrays the stark realities of child abuse, gender violence, and immigration, while throwing her voice behind the struggle for contemporary feminism and Catalan independence. 



  • Marlene Olin

    Marlene Olin’s short stories and essays have been published in journals such as the Massachusetts Review, Catapult, PANK, and the Baltimore Review. She is the recipient of both the 2015 Rick Demarinis Fiction Award and the 2018 So to Speak Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and for inclusion in Best American Short Stories.



  • Photo: Rolando Diazdiv>

    Ursula Andkjær Olsen

    Ursula Andkjær Olsen (b. 1970, Copenhagen) made her literary debut in 2000 and has since published nine collections of poetry. Olsen has received numerous grants and awards for her work, including the prestigious Montanaprisen for Det 3. årtusindes hjerte (Third-Millennium Heart) and the Danish Critics’ Prize for its sequel, Udgående Fartøj (Outgoing Vessel).



  • Deji Olukotun

    Deji Olukotun is the inaugural Freedom to Write Fellow at PEN American Center. A practicing human-rights attorney, he is also a passionate fiction writer. His novel Nigerians in Space will be published by Ricochet Books this year. You can follow him on Twitter @dejiridoo or find out more at returnofthedeji.com. WLT published his Pushcart-nominated story “Home Affairs,” about a father and son attempting to penetrate the notorious Refugee Reception Office in Cape Town, in its September 2009 issue.



  • Kristín Ómarsdóttir

    Kristín Ómarsdóttir (b. 1962) is one of Iceland’s most acclaimed living authors. She has published nine novels, eight poetry collections, seven books of short stories, and half a dozen plays and radio dramas. Her novels have been translated into many languages, and her selected poems in English, Waitress in Fall (trans. Vala Thorodds), was chosen as a poetry book of the year by the Sunday Times and the White Review. She lives in Reykjavík.


  • Orbita

    Orbita formed in 1999 when Latvian poets Artur Punte, Sergey Timofejev, Semyon Khanin, Zhorzh Uallik, and Vladimir Svetlov, who write in Russian, got together to establish a "text-group." The mulitimedia project entitled Orbita (The Orbit) birthed from these roots starting out with readings in clubs, city squares, and even a small ship, from locations spanning Riga, Moscow, Minsk, Stockhom, Prague, Leipzig, and New York. In 2000 the group produed a CD titled O2 and in 2001 they held a poetic video festival, Word in Motion. Orbita 4 was released as a poetry CD+DVD in 2004. The audio CD is a collaboration with a variety of musicians from Riga, Moscow and St. Petersburg. The DVD is compiled works of Latvian artists from two video festivals and new videopoems from Orbita and partners. Orbita's website is www.orbita.lv.



  • Romeo Oriogun

    Romeo Oriogun (@SonOfOlokun), a Nigerian poet, is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Poetry Review, Poetry London, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, he is an alumni of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work was profiled in the Spring 2020 issue of World Literature Today.



  • Peter Orner

    Peter Orner is the author of Love and Shame and Love, a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book, and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a novel set in Namibia and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Two books will be out in 2013, a reissue of his first book, Esther Stories, and a new story collection, Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge. Born in Chicago, Orner lives in San Francisco.


  • Jorge Ortega

    Jorge Ortega (b. 1972, Mexicali) is one of Mexico’s most celebrated contemporary poets. His recent collection, Devoción por la piedra, won Mexico’s highly coveted poetry prize named in honor of Jaime Sabines, the Premio Internacional de Poesía Jaime Sabines of 2010. Other titles include Ajedrez de polvo (Tsé-Tsé, 2003) and Estado del tiempo (Poesía Hiperión, 2004). His work has been included in numerous anthologies in Mexico and the United States, including Across the Line. The Poetry of Baja California (Junction Press, 2002). His poetry and translations of such poets as Hart Crane have appeared in such journals as Letras Libres, The Bitter Oleander, The Black Herald Review, Crítica, and Structo.



  • Anna Maria Ortese

    Anna Maria Ortese (1914–1998) was an Italian writer of short stories, novels, and reportage. Her prolific body of work encompasses elements of neorealism and magical realism. She spent parts of the 1930s and 1940s living in Naples, and her 1953 collection Il mare non bagna Napoli documents her impressions of the postwar city.


  • T. Patrick Ortez

    T. Patrick Ortez is a WLT intern and graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, where he is pursuing a career as a speculative-fiction writer. His passions include dogs, cooking, and Mexican culture. 



  • Simon J. Ortiz

    Poet, fiction, and creative nonfiction writer Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) is a retired Regents Professor at Arizona State University and editor emeritus of Red Ink journal. He is determined to express an Indigenous voice that he believes is the essence of present-day reality, conscience, culture, and sense of responsibility.



  • Photo by Harold Baquetdiv>

    Brenda Marie Osbey

    Brenda Marie Osbey is a poet, essayist, and librettist working in English and French. Her six books include her collected poems, All Souls: Essential Poems (LSU Press, 2015); History and Other Poems (Time Being, 2013); and All Saints: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1997). The first peer-selected poet laureate of Louisiana (2005–2007), Osbey is a native New Orleanian.



  • Shauna Osborn

    Shauna Osborn is an award-winning Numunuu (Comanche) / German mestiza artist, researcher, and wordsmith. Her debut poetry collection is called Arachnid Verve. She was recently named national director of the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. You can find her online at shaunamosborn.wordpress.com.


  • J. David Osborne

    J. David Osborne is the author of Black Gum. He runs the indie press Broken River Books out of Norman, Oklahoma.



  • Sanya Osha

    Sanya Osha is the author of several books, including Postethnophilosophy (2011), Dust, Spittle and Wind (2011), An Underground Colony of Summer Bees (2012), and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow (expanded ed., 2021), among other publications. He works at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, South Africa.



  • Ladan Osman

    Ladan Osman (@OsmanLadan) is a Somali-born artist whose work is a lyric and exegetic response to problems of race, gender, displacement, and colonialism. She is the author of Exiles of Eden (2019) and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (2015), winner of a Sillerman First Book Prize. Her most recent collection, Exiles of Eden, is a work of poetry, photos, and experimental text. Her work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Roar, Rumpus, among others. Osman’s writing has been translated into over ten languages. She currently lives in Brooklyn.



  • Niyi Osundare

    Nigerian poet, playwright, essayist, and scholar Niyi Osundare has authored eighteen books of poetry, two books of selected poems, four plays, two books of essays, and numerous scholarly articles and reviews. Among his many prizes are the Tchicaya U Tam’si Award for African Poetry (generally regarded as Africa’s highest poetry prize) and the Fonlon/Nichols Award for “excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa.” Former professor and chair of the English Department, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, he is currently Distinguished Professor of English, University of New Orleans.



  • Jamal Ouariachi

    Dutch writer Jamal Ouariachi won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2017 for his novel A Hunger, which is currently being translated into ten different languages.



  • Kyrié Eleison Owen

    Kyrié Eleison Owen is an Indigenous writer with an MFA in creative writing, nonfiction, from University of California Riverside and a BA in creative writing from University of Cincinnati. She has words in Lunch Ticket, The Nasiona, Boshemia, and Waxing & Waning, among other literary journals, and has shared her work onstage at True Theatre.



  • © Bernd Hartungdiv>

    Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

    Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (b. 1968) is the author of the novel Dust, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize. Winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, she has also received an Iowa Writers’ Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications, and she has been a TEDx Nairobi speaker and a Lannan Foundation resident. She lives in Nairobi, Kenya. Photo courtesy of Penguin Random House