Best Books for Writers

The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the East Village neighborhood of New York City was founded in 1966 as a community space for poets of the downtown poetry scene. Since its founding, the historic venue has held readings and conversations with influential figures such as Ted Berrigan, Samuel Delany, Allen Ginsberg, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Lisa Jarnot, Eileen Myles, Harryette Mullen, and Maggie Nelson. Edited by poet and former artistic director of the Poetry Project Anselm Berrigan, this anthology celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the organization with interviews first published in their newsletter featuring writers discussing various topics including, Kenneth Koch characterizing anthologies, Alice Notley on the construction of narratives, Bernadette Mayer on her vocation as a writer, and Anne Waldman on the joys of collaboration. The anthology captures the lively spirit of the historic poetry scene and is an opportunity, as Berrigan writes in the introduction, “to speak directly to a community one could perceive as known, imaginary, expanding, unwieldy, intermittent, formative, desperately necessary, and sometimes peculiarly unsatisfying all at once.”  

Edited by poet and novelist Laynie Browne, this unique anthology brings together essays by contemporary poets about their favorite “poet’s novel”—a novel written by a poet that defies the traditional conventions of plot, character, setting, and action. The fifty-seven essays include Kazim Ali on Fanny Howe, Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Gertrude Stein, Julia Bloch on Gwendolyn Brooks, Jeanne Heuving on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, John Keene on Fernando Pessoa, and Lynn Xu on Ben Lerner. Each poet provides original insights and approaches to their essays, such as Norma Cole addressing her essay of Emmanuel Hocquard’s Aerea dans les forêts de Manhattan to the late poet Stacy Doris and Traci Brimhall’s question-and-answer essay on Hilda Hilst’s The Obscene Madame D. Perfect for writers seeking to venture past the confines of genre, this anthology is both a collection of innovative critical essays and an excellent reading list of lyrical novels.  

In this collection of essays, Dorothy J. Wang offers a roadmap to rethinking how poetry is critically discussed, and the ways in which the role of race is often occluded, through the study of five contemporary Asian American poets—Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Marilyn Chin, Li-Young Lee, Pamela Lu, and John Yau. Through these close studies, Wang exemplifies a rigorous way of thinking about each poet’s craft while contending that aesthetic forms are inseparable from social, political, and historical contexts in the writing and reception of all poetry. Wang covers a vast range of aesthetics, from traditional lyric poetry to avant-garde work, looking into the nuances behind metaphor, desire, form, and irony. The book asks us all to be better readers, in particular, when considering the ways in which we critique poetry. As Wang contends in the preface of the book: “Critics should accord the same degree of complexity and respect to the whole stylistic range of minority poetry as they do to ‘racially unmarked’ poetry.”  

From the author of the memoir The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography comes this slim volume combining craft with autobiography and offering a response from a woman’s perspective to George Orwell’s influential essay “Why I Write.” Organized into chapters named after Orwell’s four reasons to write—“Political Purpose,” “Historical Impulse,” “Sheer Egoism,” and “Aesthetic Enthusiasm”—Levy identifies the life experiences that have shaped her novels, including her South African childhood, her family’s expatriation to England, and the challenges of motherhood. Levy spans continents and decades as she analyzes what it means to be a woman writer, quoting authors such as Adrienne Rich and Marguerite Duras. Both philosophical and practical, this unique book of memories and lessons portrays how creative ideas come to life, offering readers an inspiring look into the life of a working writer.  

This sixth edition of compiled speeches from the prestigious Hopwood Creative Writing Awards includes lectures by recipients such as Charles Baxter, Donald Hall, Charles Johnson, Susan Orlean, and Edmund White. With an introduction by Nicholas Delbanco, who edited the book and directed the Hopwood Program at the University of Michigan until 2015, this collection includes lectures from 1999 to 2008. Topics include the relationship between reading and writing, the evolution of the gay novel, and the successes and failures of the creative writing workshop. Varying in approaches and writing styles, these instructive, thoughtful lectures offer writers of all backgrounds a chance to learn from literary figures at the height of their craft.  

“Is it any wonder that any writing task fills so many people with dread? It’s about time we brought them in from the cold and let them find fulfillment in writing from inside themselves,” writes Thomas C. Foster, professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan–Flint, in the introduction to this approachable guide on developing a voice and maintaining a writing practice. The book is organized into three sections (Why Write?, What to Write and How, and Soaring Practice) and is written with a combination of personal anecdotes and lessons with exemplary writing from authors such as Joan Didion, Robert Frost, Malcolm Gladwell, and Ernest Hemingway. Topics include how to sharpen one’s sense of description, revision on a structural level, and development of one’s personal style of writing. Although primarily focused on memoir writing, the book’s lessons, writing exercises and prompts, and sentiment to “write like you mean it” can prove useful for writers of all levels and genres.  

Edited by Robin Hemley, author of Turning Life Into Fiction (Graywolf Press, 2006), and Xu Xi, author of This Fish Is Fowl: Essays of Being (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), this craft book finds inspiration and guidance in the diverse literary traditions of Asia. Featuring works in translation by writers from Japan, China, India, Singapore, and beyond, as well as writers from Asian diasporas in Europe and America, this guide and anthology offers a wide range of voices and approaches to crafting short fiction. “Our aim is to open up a world of stories you might not otherwise come across and to glean from these stories’ techniques and approaches, some of which you might find in your typical fiction writing text and some that you likely wouldn’t find,” write the editors in the introduction to the book. Each of the eleven themed chapters includes a complete short story and writing exercises that invite readers to practice narrative techniques used by exemplary writers such as Lysley Tenorio, Nam Le, Dorothy Tse, and Banana Yoshimoto. Covering themes such as race and identity, history and power, family and aspirations, this guide offers a fresh take on craft that invites writers to look beyond the western canon.  

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In this collection of essays on poetry and politics, award-winning poet and professor Martín Espada examines the intersections of social advocacy and poetry. Espada uses his personal experience as a poet and former tenant lawyer in Boston’s Latino community to discuss the way poets have advocated for the voiceless, such as Edgar Lee Masters with his groundbreaking 1915 collection Spoon River Anthology, Walt Whitman with his ever-growing editions of Leaves of Grass, and Jack Agüeros with his Sonnets From the Puerto Rican. “Clearly, there is common ground between bards and barristers which goes beyond a fascination with language or the use of words as weapons. In my experience, that common ground is advocacy,” writes Espada. With topics including the poetry of rebellion in Puerto Rico, the art of “speaking of the unspoken places,” and the importance of rejecting the poetics of self-marginalization, this collection of essays offers inspiration and an exploration of what it means to embrace the role of the poet as activist.  

“Poems arrive. They hide in feelings and images, in weeds and delivery vans, daring us to notice and give them form with our words,” writes Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge in the introduction to this craft book in which she invites writers to tap into the poetry of their daily lives. Drawing on her years of experience as a poet and teacher leading workshops for the California Poets in the School program, Wooldridge mixes personal vignettes with lessons on how to create images, develop metaphors, and use all the senses as a writer. Featuring five evocatively titled sections, including “Listening to Ourselves,” “Open the Window,” and “Lights and Mysteries,” Wooldridge inserts practice sections throughout the book providing themed prompts and instructions on how to expand one’s writing practice in order to lead to new work. “Poems hang out where life is,” writes Wooldridge, offering encouragement to foster a sense of attention to the world and play with words.  

“Just as there is no ready-made compositional formula, heuristic, syllogism, or algorithm for poetry or its reception by a reader or reading public, there is also no one, true, proven, repeatable, or even identifiable way to assemble a book of poems,” write editors Sarah Giragosian and Virginia Konchan in the introduction to this anthology of essays on the art and science of constructing a poetry manuscript. The essays by poets such as Kazim Ali, Victoria Chang, Annie Finch, Philip Metres, and Diane Seuss vary in their approach as they move from lyrical to critical to instructional. Topics include discussions on the use of autobiography in a narrative arc, the relationship between poetry and visual art, how to establish an organizing structural principle, and FAQs from writers at various stages of their work. Rather than provide a clear answer to the elusive practice of manuscript assembly, this anthology offers an eclectic mix of approaches for any writer seeking guidance on how to put a book together.  

Published by the Song Cave and edited by Alan Felsenthal, this collection gathers in print selected interviews from over thirty years of the nationally syndicated radio program Bookworm, hosted by Michael Silverblatt, who Norman Mailer once called “the best reader in America.” The iconic host is known for developing relationships with writers over many years and producing intimate conversations including interviews with David Foster Wallace, who was a frequent guest from 1996 to 2006. Twelve interviews with esteemed writers such as John Ashbery, John Berger, Joan Didion, Carlos Fuentes, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, and W. G. Sebald are selected in this rare anthology. Filled with passionate conversations and instructive close readings of exemplary texts, this collection provides a close look into the life and craft of some of our era’s most iconic minds.