Best Books for Writers

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.

The best-selling author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Book of Longings collects stories from her own life and the lives of other authors—Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, Virginia Woolf, and many others—in this guidebook for writers on their journey. Filled with inspiring gems, such as, “a work with soul lingers” and “no matter what you hope to write, there’s some craft to learn,” the book instills the belief that writing is a spiritual act and writers must not only have imagination and craft, but also the heart to create work that is powerful and enduring. Throughout each chapter, Kidd provides companionship and encouragement. “This book is part memoir, part guidebook, and part reflection on the writing life,” writes Kidd. “Writing is a solitary enterprise, but it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The creative person, the creative process, the creative work are all vastly affected by the support and sustenance that surround us. We all need someone to hold up a light. To say, I see you.” 

Edited by Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry includes three hundred poems written by poets from around the world and across the ages. Featuring the work of Judah Al-Harizi, Li-Young Lee, Anna Kamieńska, Antonio Machado, and Tu Fu, among others, the anthology is divided into evocatively titled sections such as “The Secret of a Thing,” “The Moment,” “People Among People,” and “Nonattachment.” Milosz provides a preface to each poem, making the book more than just an assemblage of writers from around the world, but an instructional and inspirational reminder of the power that poetry has to touch the soul. 

This anthology collects twenty-four essays by contemporary women poets whose careers were influenced by the women who came before them. Selections include Beth Ann Fennelly on Denise Duhamel, Katy Lederer on Lyn Hejinian, Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Naomi Shihab Nye, Eleni Sikelianos on Alice Notley, and Tracy K. Smith on Lucie Brock-Broido, with poems by both the mentors and mentees following the essays. The book demonstrates the powerful, varied, and complex ways in which mentorship takes form and poetic traditions move between generations and within a community. “These essays shed light on how our contributors became poets, where they find inspiration, and how they came to make important poetic life choices: the essays also describe a new kind of influence, one less hierarchical and less patriarchal than the traditional model,” write the editors in the introduction. “We offer this book as tribute to and celebration of those who have paved our way, those who continue on the path alongside us, and those who are yet to come.”  

On the surface this slim, razor-sharp memoir is a response to a question posed to the author by the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City: “Why do you write?” But such a prompt in the hands of Toews, the author of eight novels, including Fight Night (Bloomsbury, 2021), Women Talking (Bloomsbury, 2019), and All My Puny Sorrows (McSweeney’s, 2014), serves as highly combustible fuel for a fast-paced, genre-bending examination not of her reasons but rather her will to write. In short, sharp bursts of prose that are often both joyful and devastating on the same page, Toews excavates layer after layer of grief and guilt as she explores her uneasy pact with memory: Her father and sister both killed themselves after long bouts of silence. “The immense altering of silence, of writing. It is the same. We are sisters. We are thieves. We steal ourselves, and others, and we alter them, Frankenstein them, ourselves, into something that tracks, that scans, that makes sense, that remains,” she writes. “Why do you write? Why do you live?” 

Since 2008, Irish novelist Kevin Power has reviewed over three hundred books and fell in love with the writing of criticism, as well as the reading of it. This collection of his essays include some of his reviews of books by authors—such as Martin Amis, Marlon James, Marilyn Robinson, Sally Rooney, Zadie Smith, Susan Sontag, and Colson Whitehead—as well as his thoughts on Greta Thunberg, apocalyptic politics, and literary theory. On his work as a critic, Power writes: “Even now, cracking open a brand-new hardback with my pencil in my hand, I feel the same pleasure, and the same hope. That’s the great secret: every critic is an optimist at heart.” This book celebrates the art of criticism and offers a glimpse at how one writer grows into an artist and a critic. 

This volume published by Penguin Classics collects early essays by renowned Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges with his reflections on becoming a writer and the art of literature. Included are essays translated into English for the first time, including his groundbreaking essay on magical realism “Stories From Turkestan.” There are also sections on the craft of poetry, fiction, and translation, as well as one titled “The Critic at Work” with his thoughts on the work of authors such as T. S. Eliot, Herman Melville, and Virginia Woolf. Not only is this an excellent handbook for writers finding their own voice, this collection is a peek into Borges’s evolution as a writer. 

“The way we attend to the world changes the world we perceive, and the world we perceive changes the way we attend.” In this craft book, Lucy Alford shifts away from the conventional perspective of poetic form as the product of technical devices and focuses on understanding the effects of poetry through the lens of the writer’s attention, making the case that the most integral aspect of creating poetry revolves around refining relationships to attention. Alford’s close readings and analyses of work by authors, including Al-Khansā’, A. R. Ammons, Charles Bukowski, Anne Carson, Paul Celan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Audre Lorde, Stéphane Mallarmé, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine, demonstrate the uniqueness of attention required and produced by poetry, and offers writers a fresh angle with which to approach their own work. 

This collection of essays about writing and navigating the literary world by writers of color offers wisdom, insight, support, and advice on how to carve out a more expansive space for diverse voices. The book is divided into sections focusing on themes such as literary gatekeeping, the tyranny of grammar, identities, personal narratives, rejection, and healing. Wesley Brown, Ching-In Chen, Sherrie Fernandez Williams, Marline Gonzalez, Hei Kyoung Kim, and Sagirah Shahid are among the authors of lyric essays that are paired with inspiring and generative writing exercises to help open up ideas as well as reflection and understanding. “I believe who we are influences our writing, just as who we are may defy those who think they have power over our writing,” writes Quan Lee in the introduction. “I wanted a textbook that considers the relevance of race, class, gender, age, and sexual identity; culture and language; and that by so doing, on some level, facilitates healing.”