How Literature Can Save the World

Daniel Seifert's writing is published in The New York Times, Consequence, and Gulf Coast. His work received a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize 2026 anthology, and has twice been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. He lives in Singapore, and is working on a novel. 

Ibrahim Fawzy,  is a literary translator, academic and writer from Egypt. He holds an MA in Comparative Literature. His translations, reviews and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in ArabLit Quarterly, Words Without Borders, The Markaz Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Poetry Ireland Review, among others. He is currently an editorial assistant at Rowayat, and podcasts at New Books Network. In 2023, he finished a six-month mentorship with the British National Centre for Writing. He was a recipient of Culture Resource’s 2023 Wijhat grant. His translation of Khalid Al-Nasrallah’s The White Line of Night won the 2023 English PEN Presents. His translation of Rema Hmoud’s “Glass” has been shortlisted for Deep Vellum’s The Best Literary Translations 2024 Anthology.

Mara Karlin, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities, Brookings Institute Fellow and Director for Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, and author of The Inheritance. 

Matt K. Parker has been many things in his life: a musician, a programmer, an activist, a writer, a consultant, a business owner, a husband, a father. And he's lived in many places, including Texas, New York, California, and Connecticut. But amidst all the life and career changes, and all the moving from one coast to the other and back, the one constant in his life has been reading. 
 
Whether hiding with a book in his closet as a kid, or burying his nose in a book on a subway train, or waking up before dawn to get a quiet hour of reading done before his many boisterous children awaken, Matt has always found refuge in reading. And although his reading tastes have varied widely over his life, he has, for the last few years, increasingly settled into reading literature, from the ancient to the contemporary. 
 
Today, Matt likes to interact with other fans of literature on Twitter, where he both sources recommendations for books from others, and also shares out his own thoughts on what he's reading. And Matt currently dreams of founding a non-profit dedicated to increasing adult literature readership by an order of magnitude, focused first on readership in the United States, but then expanding to the entire globe.
 
You can follow Matt on twitter at @realmattkparker.

Watch this episode here: https://youtu.be/5fsc-6-XpNU
 

Randy Winston, writer, Director of Fiction at The Black List, host of the podcast, Read the Acknowledgments, and former Creative Director for the Center for Fiction. Find him at RW.
Watch this interview at https://youtu.be/kePiTHOhDLU 

Hugh Martin, poet and author of In Country and The Stick Soldiers, editor of War, Literature, and the Arts, professor, and veteran of the conflict in Iraq.

Joe Meno, author of Hairstyles of the Damned, Marval and a Wonder, The Boy Detective Fails, and Book of Extraordinary Tragedies; editor and professor.

Natalia Theodoridou is a transmasculine writer whose stories have appeared in publications such as Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, and Strange Horizons, and have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Estonian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. He won the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, the 2022 Emerging Writer Award by Moniack Mhor & The Bridge Awards, and the Nebula Award in 2025. He holds a PhD in media and cultural studies from SOAS, University of London. Born in Greece, with roots in Georgia, Russia, and Turkey, he currently lives in the UK. His debut novel, Sour Cherry, a queer Bluebeard retelling about toxic masculinity and cycles of abuse, came out in April 2025 from Tin House (US) and Wildfire (UK). 
Website: www.natalia-theodoridou.com 

Elizabeth Lukács Chesla is the daughter of Hungarian refugees and a mother of three. Her award-winning fiction debut, You Cannot Forbid the Flower, was published in 2023. She writes, edits, and teaches from the suburbs of Philadelphia, where she was born and raised.
Liz holds an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and certificates in Transformative Language Arts and trauma-sensitive yoga. She has taught a wide range of writing and literature courses and is an emerging literary translator. A dedicated and compassionate editor and educator, Liz serves as fiction editor for Consequence Forum and senior editor for Inch and Meter. She teaches at Gwynedd Mercy University. Find her (and purchase her book!) at ELIZABETH LUKÁCS CHESLA – author and editor.