Poet, translator, and essayist Daniel Simon is assistant director and editor in chief of World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture. During his twenty-two-year tenure at WLT, the magazine has received more than two dozen awards, and WLT’s readership has grown to 1.3 million readers annually across all platforms.
Dr. Simon serves on the affiliate faculty for OU’s Schusterman Center for Judaic & Israel Studies, Department of English, and Department of International & Area Studies. His verse collections include Cast Off (2015), After Reading Everything (2016), and Under a Gathering Sky (2024), and his poems have been reprinted in the anthologies Oklahoma Poems . . . and Their Poets (2014), World English Poetry (2015), and Voices Now: World Poetry Today (2023). Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology, 1867–2017, which he edited, won a 2018 Nebraska Book Award and was included on NPR’s “50 States” summer booklist (2022). His 2020 anthology project, Dispatches from the Republic of Letters: 50 Years of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, was named a Publishers Weekly starred pick. Most recently, he served as consulting editor for the Best Literary Translations annual anthology, published by Deep Vellum in spring 2024. His newest anthology, World Literature: From High Modernism to the Present Day, 1925–2025 (forthcoming in 2026), will be published in conjunction with the WLT centennial in 2026–2027.
At OU, Dr. Simon has been active on campus for the past twenty-four years. Most recently, he co-chaired the coordinating committee for the commemorations of the Tulsa Race Massacre centennial throughout the 2020–2021 academic year on the Norman, Tulsa, and OUHSC campuses, in partnership with the Clara Luper Department of African & African American Studies, with funding from Oklahoma Humanities and the university’s Faculty Investment Program. In 2019 he spearheaded a new minor in editing and publishing with the College of Journalism, College of Arts & Sciences, and College of Fine Arts. He also helps conceptualize, plan, and host WLT’s annual Neustadt Lit Fest; has served on PhD committees and the Provost’s PhD Dissertation Prize committee; and routinely gives talks, partners with other units on campus to bring writers to OU, and helps WLT fulfill the university’s teaching mission, outreach mission, and strategic plan.
He is a member of the Academy of American Poets, PEN America, Nebraska Center for the Book, and the Norman Arts Council Roundtable.
