Meet Our Grantee-Partner: Words Without Borders
Words Without Borders cultivates global awareness by expanding access to international writing and creating a bridge between readers, writers, and translators.
Puerto Rican poet Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro leads a bilingual workshop for NYC high school students through WWB Campus's visiting author program. Photo courtesy of Words Without Borders.
Mission: Words Without Borders is the premier destination for a global literary conversation. Our mission is to cultivate global awareness by expanding access to international writing and creating a bridge between readers, writers, and translators. Our digital magazine offers unparalleled access to the world’s literary voices, and our education program, WWB Campus, brings global literature into hundreds of classrooms worldwide. WWB organizes free events with international authors, translators, and critics, providing a space for readers to engage directly with the perspectives we publish.
Words Without Borders (WWB) was founded in 2003 to counter cultural isolationism in the United States after the 9/11 attacks, when fewer than 3% of books published in the country were translations. The organization’s three founding editors, Dedi Felman, Alane Salierno Mason, and Samantha Schnee, believed that publishing a free, online literary magazine would enable more English-speaking readers to engage with other cultures and perspectives through literature, which could build more empathy.
WWB serves a diverse, multilingual, and international audience, ranging from publishing professionals to casual readers who have minimal experience with literature in translation. Each year, its website welcomes 700,000 visitors, more than 60% of whom live outside the United States. Authors and translators, particularly from communities underrepresented in publishing, are another core part of this audience. In a field known for low wages and professional precarity, WWB supports contributors by offering competitive fees and valuable exposure through publication on its website and participation in free literary events.
Quechua Peruvian author Marco Avilés leads a bilingual workshop for NYC high school students through WWB Campus's visiting author program. Photo courtesy of Words Without Borders.
WWB also serves high school and college educators and students through WWB Campus, a free, innovative education program that helps teachers bring global literature into the classroom. WWB Campus creates a robust suite of curricular materials from WWB’s archive to accompany literature from more than 70 countries. The content fosters exploration and discovery and prompts discussions about race, migration, social justice, gender, and cultural differences. WWB Campus organizes author and translator visits to classrooms and offers training sessions to educators, schools, and school districts. Many students report that these visits are the first time they encounter their heritage in the classroom.
WWB’s digital magazine offers unparalleled access to the world’s literary voices, introducing readers to writers like Elena Ferrante, Olga Tokarczuk, and Han Kang, who were published on WWB before they became international sensations. WWB is committed to centering authors writing in Indigenous, endangered, and other world languages that are often marginalized. To date, WWB has published the work of 4,600 writers and translators from nearly 150 countries and translated from more than 140 languages, from Amharic to Zamboangueño Chavacano.
WWB organizes in-person and virtual literary programs that bring together international authors, translators, and scholars for readings and discussions. These events foster a global literary conversation and raise the visibility of international authors and their translators.
Receiving a Poetry Programs, Partnerships, and Innovation grant from the Poetry Foundation enabled WWB to hire Sohini Basak as the poetry editor, a position that didn’t exist prior. In her tenure at WWB, Basak has drawn on her UK- and India-based networks to publish dozens of poets and poetry translators WWB had never worked with before. Grant funds also enabled WWB to continue its annual partnership with the Academy of American Poets (AAP), through which four international poets reached about 500,000 readers via publication on WWB and in AAP’s Poem-a-Day newsletter. In September 2024, this partnership featured poets from China, Denmark, Palestine, and South Korea, helping them reach new and broader audiences. Funding from the Poetry Foundation also supported a virtual multilingual reading by the four poets and their translators.
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