Best Books for Writers

One needn’t be a writer to appreciate the essays in Jesmyn Ward’s collected nonfiction, filled as they are with insights and observations about the two-time National Book Award–winning author’s childhood and upbringing in rural Mississippi, her experience raising a Black son in the United States, and the personal tragedies that have impacted her life. But the book holds special treasures for writers looking for examples of how art, and writing in particular, helps us survive. The collection features Ward’s “Why Fiction Matters” address at the Library of Congress in 2023, the speech she delivered at Toni Morrison’s memorial in 2019, her Eudora Welty lecture “You Tell Your Story: You Survive,” and essays about authors such as Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates. “Writers were magic-workers,” she writes in the introduction about a realization she had in the library of her elementary school. Readers of On
Witness and
Respair will know the feeling.  

Each of the ten sections of this book of craft essays edited by poet Diane Lockward focuses on a poetic concept, covering topics such as diction, etymology, sound, tone, point of view, and revision. The thirty micro craft essays by acclaimed poets, including Natasha Sajé, Maggie Smith, and Diane Seuss, are each followed by prompts and model poems with the idea that “the craft of poetry can be taught and its best teacher is a good poem.” In addition, the Top Tips lists compiled by accomplished poets are filled with inspiring words of advice and wisdom. Throughout the book, the lessons provide a helpful review and challenge for any writer wishing to push beyond the basics.  

From the author of three inventive novels, including Life Is Everywhere (Graywolf Press, 2022), as well as collections of poems, short stories, and essays, comes a unique book that is at once a compendium of intriguing writing exercises (“Write about a character who invents her own readers”), a collection of questions (“Who is writing this book?”), and a “diary of contemplation and imagination.” At home alongside Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, Three Six Five presents fresh ways of thinking about writing and the endless possibilities it contains. “Locate the shadows nearest you,” Ives writes in No. 65 of an entire year’s worth of entries and encourages writers to describe them, first in terms of their qualities, then: “What do these shadows hide or reveal? What is inside them?” For writers with a love of play and a spirit of discovery, Three Six Five offers encouragement and inspiration for a year of literary exploration.  

The fifteen essays collected in Chaos, Creativity, Completion are written by poets, novelists, memoirists, filmmakers, and other writers with ADHD. A range of styles are voiced in each essay with personal reflections and ways of finding writing practices that work with ADHD, exemplifying the array of experiences and expressions. Contributors include Robin Black, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Douglas Kearney, Jami Nakamura Lin, and Khadijah Queen. A writing prompt follows each essay, allowing readers to consider new ways of thinking and writing that often look different from traditional writing instruction. In the foreword to the book, Rebecca Makkai writes: “As the world recognizes more and more neurodivergences—and accepts them as vital, not as sad accidents of nature—we can surely find a way to make the world more ours. The contributors to this anthology are doing that, if only by writing about a reality that a reader might relate to strongly or might have never even imagined.” 

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.”