Best Books for Writers

This thin book captures Ada Limón’s final lecture as the twenty-fourth U.S. poet laureate which she delivered at the Library of Congress at the end of her tenure in April 2025. Limón’s mission to make poetry approachable and accessible continues through this book as she describes her project You Are Here, which placed poetry installations in seven national parks, and the meaningful connections with people she met along the way while in her post. Included are excerpts of some of her favorite poems, including Emily Dickinsons’s “If I Can Stop One Heart From Breaking” and Alberto Riós’s “A House Called Tomorrow.” Through this book, Limón welcomes all to explore themselves through poetry and its ability to heal and connect people. “If you need to remember what makes us human, tender, brave, flawed, and worthy of love, you need poetry,” writes Limón. 

“What happens when we are with each other? What happens in the aftermath? What do we do then? We use language. We make. We look. We hope. We speak. We listen. We change, in all kinds of ways.” In this collection, an expansion of the Poetry Unbound podcast hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama, in which each episode is a close examination of a single poem, the chosen poems explore the “energy that occurs between people” and reflect on human connection. As with Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World, a short essay introduces each poem about why it was chosen and an essay with a close look at the poet’s craft follows. Included are poems by Jericho Brown, Tiana Clark, Chen Chen, Rita Dove, Safia Elhillo, Joy Harjo, Langston Hughes, Patricia Smith, and many others. 

Drawing from her own experience of translating Roland Barthes’s lecture notes, Kate Briggs offers a fresh take on what it’s like to read, write, and live with the works of others. In this book-length essay, Briggs explores the art and practice of literary translation with curiosity and humility, allowing readers along to experience her explorations. The author recounts the story of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Thomas Mann, as well as the close relationship between André Gide and his translator Dorothy Bussy, among other stories. Anyone interested in translation, writing, and language will find helpful and insightful lessons within the pages of This Little Art. 

This comprehensive book focused on the history of memoir writing by journalist and English professor Ben Yagoda begins by defining autobiography and memoirs as “a book understood by its author, its publisher, and its readers to be a factual account of the author’s life,” while the memoir encompasses “books that cover the entirety or some portion of it.” The modern popularity of the genre sparks Yagoda’s exploration tracing back to the fifth-century classic The Confessions of Saint Augustine and the groundbreaking autobiographies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frederick Douglass, as well as looking to contemporary examples of addiction, redemption, and canine memoirs, and those deemed as fake memoirs. Readers interested in reading and writing memoirs will enjoy the reflections on the ways memory and truth can be interpreted, and who decides how one’s life is remembered. 

This book comprises an engaging selection of interviews published in Loyola University’s New Orleans Review from 1968 to 2018. Writers of all genres will be inspired by discussions with twenty-four authors and activists—including John Ashbery, James Baldwin, Susan Bernofsky, Jorge Luis Borges, Sheila Heti, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Anaïs Nin, and Eudora Welty—who share their unique perspectives on a wide range of topics covering the aesthetic and social aspects of writing. “It occurs to me now that the interviewer and interviewee share a potentiality that is not unlike that of the reader and the writer,” says editor Mark Yakich in the introduction. “In the following pages, both readers and writers will find much to commiserate with, to enjoy, and to be inspired by.”  

In this guide to memoir writing, Jessica Handler, author of The Magnetic Girl and Invisible Sisters, uses the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief to guide writers through the emotional and technical steps of exploring and completing a work about loss. Taking from personal experiences, as well as knowledge from authors such as Nick Flynn, Robin Hemley, Kathryn Rhett, Darin Strauss, and Natasha Trethewey, Handler offers support and encouragement to write the hard stories that need to be told. Each chapter includes advice from therapists on the experience of grieving and ends with writing exercises unique to each topic. “What I hope is that this book will help you write your way through your grief and into renewal,” writes Handler. “Consider this book a guide to finding your way through the very personal journey of writing a true story that’s hard to tell and impossible to forget.” 

With chapters titled “Make it a Habit” and “How to Keep Going,” this book on the craft of writing fiction goes beyond the technical aspects of writing and into the “psychic equipment you’ll need to keep going” as a writer. Brian Morton offers lessons from his career as a writer and teacher that focus on developing and sustaining a habit of writing and deepening the resilience necessary to be a published author. Included are inspiring lessons and stories from the lives of artists and authors, such as Anton Chekhov, Joni Mitchell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Virginia Woolf, as well as practical tips and encouragement for writers at any stage in their career. “Part of what it means to make writing a habit is learning to shuck off the beginner’s idea that you should write only when you feel inspired,” writes Morton. “Inspiration won’t come every time you sit down to write, but the more you sit down to write, the more often it will come.” 

A collection of 280 notes filled with personal and professional lessons gleaned from a teaching career stretching back more than thirty-five years; informed by the writing and publication of seven acclaimed books of fiction, most recently the novel The Hero of This Book (Ecco, 2022); and infused with the author’s signature humility, humanity, and humor, A Long Game is a guide not only to the craft of writing fiction, but also to the art of living as a working writer. Free of surefire claims and one-size-fits-all rules, the book grew from the belief that there are no definitive answers to the questions that arise when a writer is truly engaged in the act of writing. “A writing life, I’ve come to believe, is a yearslong process of casting away everything you once believed for sure,” she writes. Instead, McCracken shares tips and insights that allow writers to find their own answers. “Different writers need different advice,” she notes. A Long Game has lessons for everyone.  

In this fourth volume of the Rose Metal Press Field Guide series, twenty-eight creators of poetry comics, graphic narratives, and literary collage offer their own methods and processes to illuminate and demystify the creation of graphic literature. The craft essays by authors, such as Oliver Baez Bendorf, Thi Bui, Naoko Fujimoto, Mira Jacob, Kristen Radtke, and Bianca Stone, include examples of their work along with corresponding exercises to get writers started. Editors Kelcey Ervick and Tom Hart include a historical introduction that links today’s graphic literature to the visual storytelling of the past, from papyrus rolls to Japanese calligraphic poems to comics. Through this guidebook, the editors hope to “encourage and inspire creative experimentation in the making and teaching of graphic literature, no matter your disciplinary expertise or background.” 

Combining deeply personal experience and exacting professional insights, former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith demystifies the art form and argues that poetry “is rooted in fundamentally human qualities innate to our capacities to love, dream, question, and cultivate community.” Smith allows the reader to look over her shoulder as she shares her own creative process, demonstrating how poetry is uniquely suited to enable readers and writers to better confront the challenges of life’s uncertainties and better understand themselves. These personal observations are punctuated by craft and close readings of contemporary and classic poems alike, including works by Joy Harjo and Danez Smith as well as Emily Dickinson and John Keats. “Far from something to fear...poetry is an art form that allows us to redefine our relationship to fear by stepping in close to the facets of the world that we don’t like, or don’t understand,” she writes. “Often enough, these are the same things.”  

This anthology of poems edited by Nancy Perloff, curator of Modern & Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, examines the concrete poetry movement of the 1950s and 1960s and questions the defining features of concrete as put forth by the poets themselves. As Perloff writes in the book, “an essential principle of concretism is ‘that language has a visual dimension and that the actual “look” of a poem on the page determines, at least in part, its meaning.’” Included are works from throughout Europe and North America, as well as Japan and Brazil, and contemporary contributions by Cia Rinne and Susan Howe. Readers are treated to nearly two hundred color and black-and-white illustrations of poems, reproduced in their original languages, together with commentary on each offering context and recognition to this influential postmodernist poetic genre.