Best Books for Writers

From the newly published to the invaluable classic, our list of essential books for creative writers.

  • The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation

    by
    Fanny Howe
    Published in 2009
    by Graywolf Press

    “Since early adolescence I have wanted to live the life of a poet,” writes Fanny Howe in the introduction of her book of essays. Her essays form a collage of recollected memories and imaginative explorations of topics including travel, language, childhood and family, historical events and figures, love and relationships, philosophy and religion—all integral components of her life as a poet. Writers will be inspired by Howe’s intensely lyrical reflections on the creative minds and thinkers who have influenced her and the questions, experiences, and forces that have propelled her work.  

  • The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays

    by
    Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith, editors
    Published in 2023
    by University of Iowa Press

    This collection from poets and scholars Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith celebrates sonnets by American poets throughout history into the present. Written by poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Patricia Smith, Diane Seuss, Gertrude Stein, and Phillis Wheatley, these sonnets exemplify the various styles and voices expressed in this delicate form. In addition, the critical essays in the second half of the book offer studies on the methodologies, historical and theoretical perspectives, and reverence of the American sonnet. “American sonneteers early and late often write as if they are asserting the right to belong—or aren’t sure they want to belong—to the history of the sonnet, explicitly weaving their own landscape, politics, and interiority into the tradition,” write the editors in the introduction. “And while some in each generation have held the sonnet up as either the crowning jewel or an irrelevant relic of a poetic past, others have continued to plumb and sound its ongoing present.” 

  • Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

    by
    Ursula K. Le Guin
    Published in 2015
    by Mariner Books

    In this revised and updated edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1998 handbook, writers will learn how to read and revise their own work following a discussion of the basic components of prose. The ten chapters included cover everything from punctuation to point of view​, and are interspersed with examples from classic works of literature and writing exercises that put into practice Le Guin’s tips on craft. “The judgment that a work is complete...can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work,” she writes. “To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It’s worth it.”  

  • Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create

    by
    Elissa Altman
    Published in 2025
    by David R. Godin

    The author of three books of creative nonfiction, including Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing (Random House, 2020), with more than a decade of experience teaching the craft of memoir, Elissa Altman poses important questions that any writer with a personal story to tell must confront: “Who am I to tell my story? And how can we grant ourselves permission to write the stories we’re compelled to tell when we’ve been told we shouldn’t?” Through an exploration of her own story, which started with what she calls a “non-secret secret” about her father that had a profound effect on her and her family, “binding us together for the entirety of our lives,” Altman offers a compassionate, inspiring literary guide to transcending the fear and shame that can all too often keep important stories from being written. Read “The Choice to Create,” a chapter from Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create.  

  • Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying With the Masters

    by
    Robert Pinsky
    Published in 2013
    by W. W. Norton

    In this anthology, award-winning poet Robert Pinsky demonstrates how one learns to write poetry by first learning to read it. Divided into four sections—Freedom, Listening, Form, and Dreaming Things Up—Pinsky presents his mentors’ work to encourage the reader to take a practical approach, with informed pleasure and sharp interest in the craft. Included are exemplary works from poets such as Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, and William Carlos Williams. “A guide like this book aims to make useful hints and suggestions for the journey,” writes Pinsky in the preface. “For me, this anthology will succeed if it encourages the reader to emulate it by replacing it, or supplementing it.”  

  • On Writing Short Stories, Second Edition

    by
    Tom Bailey, editor
    Published in 2010
    by Oxford University Press

    This second edition of On Writing Short Stories collects nine essays on the elements of a short story from renowned authors such as Tom Bailey, Frank Conroy, Andre Dubus, Atonya Nelson, and Francine Prose. From the importance of reading to character building to publishing, the essays guide writers through the craft of the short story and the writing process. The second part of the book is an anthology of exemplary classic and contemporary short stories by Frank Conroy, Junot Díaz, James Joyce, Jhumpa Lahiri, John Updike, and others, further proof of the signifance and power of the short story. “The story form excites the immediate, intimate feeling of memory by mimicking its narrative habits and accepting its limits,” writes Tobias Wolff in the book’s foreward. “We always have a welcome ready for the old stories, and the new story slips in under that welcome and draws on all its privileges and powers.” 

  • Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue: The Best of Thirty Years of Creative Nonfiction

    by
    Lee Gutkind and Leslie Rubinkowski, editors
    Published in 2024
    by Belt Publishing

    The thirty-two essays included in this collection were published in the magazine, Creative Nonfiction, which debuted in 1994 when the literary genre was still met with skepticism. The magazine helped writers explore the personal essay and bring the genre recognition with its contributors pioneering what would come to be known as the “fourth genre.” This anthology includes contributors from the magazine’s seventy-eight issues, award-winning and contemporary authors such as Brian Boome, Carolyn Forche, Elizabeth Fortescue, Anne McGrath, John McPhee, Adrienne Rich, Richard Rodriguez, Charles Simic, and John Edgar Wideman. “Creative nonfiction was, in many ways, a release,” writes Creative Nonfiction’s founder and editor Lee Gutkind in the introduction. “It allowed and encouraged writers of poetry and fiction to cross genres, reach for new ideas, and find fresh ways of expression.” 

  • Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America

    by
    Abayomi Animashaun, editor
    Published in 2015
    by Black Lawrence Press

    In this anthology edited by Nigerian poet Abayomi Animashaun, thirty immigrant poets explore their influences and how they fit into the landscape of American poetry. The essays are divided into five sections titled “Self-Definition,” “Language,” “Influences,” “The Émigré Poet in America,” and “A Third Space.” Contributors include Zubair Ahmed, Kwame Dawes, Rigoberto González, Piotr Gwiazda, Fady Joudah, Ilya Kaminsky, Barbara Jane Reyes, Sun Yung Shin, and Ocean Vuong. “Nerval once said that you ought to travel so much that even your home becomes strange to you, but I have no hope other than the opposite, that is to say: once you cross borders often enough you find really that every place must be somehow home,” writes Kazim Ali in the introduction. “The poets collected here testify, both in these statements and in their own work, that such a home is possible.” 

  • Mastering the Process: From Idea to Novel

    by
    Elizabeth George
    Published in 2020
    by Viking

    The author of two dozen suspense novels leads readers through her writing process, revealing the steps she took to start and finish her 2008 novel, Careless in Red, from conceiving the characters and developing the voice to outlining the plot and building the scenes. In Mastering the Process, George returns to the form she established in her 2004 book, Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, in which she illustrates her points using exemplary works by E. M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Hoffman, John Irving, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Harper Lee, and Toni Morrison. This time she sticks to one consistent model—the book she wrote herself using a process she has followed for many of her novels. The result is a behind-the-scenes look at a bestselling author’s decisions as they are made throughout the creative process. 

  • Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems, For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa

    by
    John Murillo and Nicole Sealey, editors
    Published in 2024
    by Wesleyan University Press

    Edited by award-winning poets John Murillo and Nicole Sealey, this anthology of curated essays, letters, and poems celebrates the impact that Yusef Komunyakaa has had on writers, educators, and readers worldwide. Over sixty tributary pieces are included from students and fellow poets, such as Toi Derricotte, Martín Espada, Carolyn Forché, Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson, Sharon Olds, Gregory Pardlo, Lynne Thompson, and Emily Jungmin Yoon. “The word ‘anthology’ derives from the Greek anthos (flowers) and logia (collection, or gathering). This book, then, is a bouquet,” write the editors in the introduction. “A bouquet for one whose generosity, kindness, and wisdom, whose guidance, mentorship, and friendship have made rich the lives of each of the contributors.” 

  • The Art of Creative Research: A Field Guide for Writers

    by
    Philip Gerard
    Published in 2017
    by University of Chicago Press

    In this guidebook on creative research and how to use it to lend authenticity to works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, author and professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington speaks to the hard work and thrill of research. Helpful chapters guide writers through the steps of preparing a research plan, fact-checking, interviewing subjects, and using “memory, imagination, and personal expertise.” Gerard demystifies the research process with approachable steps to shine a light on the art which often unearths surprises and fuels imagination. “Research can take you to that golden intersection where the personal meets the public, the private crosses the universal, where the best literature lives,” writes Gerard. “It is deeply rooted in the writer’s heart, yet blossoms out into a larger thing that includes the world.”   

  • The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance

    by
    Philip Metres
    Published in 2018
    by University of Michigan Press

    “I am interested increasingly in poetry and the arts as a way of creating another life, of marking and embodying alternative ways of being and living,” writes Philip Metres in the introduction to this collection which gathers a decade of his writing on poetry. The book provides a historical context to poetry as resistance and explores subjects ranging from post-9/11 writing, to landscape and peace poetry, to personal examinations of poets such as Khalil Gibran, Adrienne Rich, and Lev Rubinstein. Writers will be inspired by Metres’s insightful questions and his expansive view of the different ways poetry has served as a tool for both challenging injustice and healing.  

  • By Cunning & Craft: Practical Wisdom for Fiction Writers

    by
    Peter Selgin
    Published in 2012
    by Serving House Books

    “Instinct alone isn’t enough. To produce a work of art, technique must also be brought to bear. When instinct and technique merge seamlessly, I call the result cunning,” writes Peter Selgin, author and professor at Georgia College & State University, in this craft book “for serious writers of all levels.” The comprehensive guide includes practical advice and exemplary passages that cover essential elements of the writing process from inspiration and ideas, to point of view and dialogue, to structure and revision.  

  • Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers

    by
    Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton, editors
    Published in 2019
    by University of Washington Press

    Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton curate this collection of lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island, including Billy-Ray Belcourt, Stephen Graham Jones, Terese Marie Mailhot, Deborah Miranda, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. Organized into basket-weaving themes such as “coiling” and “plaiting,” the essays challenge form and offer responses to broader questions of materiality, orality, spatiality, and temporality that affect the study and practice of Native literary traditions in North America. “For Native writers, who have long operated within a literary sphere in which most depictions of Native lives are created by non-Natives, nonfiction allows for a revision of the dominant cultural narratives that romanticize Native lives and immobilize Native emotional responses: the essay is the work of feeling and thinking,” write the editors in the introduction. “It is the flux of a character, not a frozen image of one.”

  • We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word

    by
    Franny Choi, Bao Phi, Noʻu Revilla, and Terisa Siagatonu, editors
    Published in 2024
    by Haymarket Books

    In this intergenerational collection, contemporary poets of multiple languages and lands illuminate the meaning of the Asian American and Pacific Islander identity. Contributors to this anthology divided into five sections—“Talk Story,” “Mourn,” “Pronounce,” “Fight,” and “Love”—include Marilyn Chin, Sarah Gambito, Sarah Kay, Ed Bok Lee, David Mura, Joshua Nguyen, Patrick Rosal, Teresia Teaiwa, Haunani-Kay Trask, and Shelley Wong. “Gathered from a range of contemporary schools and movements, these poems move, push, pulse,” write the editors in the introduction. “They are alive: gathered heat, heat gathering, and gathered into a motely but—we must insist—beautiful We.” 

  • Women in Independent Publishing: A History of Unsung Innovators, 1953–1989

    by
    Stephanie Anderson, editor
    Published in 2024
    by University of New Mexico Press

    This collection of interviews with women actively engaged in small press publishing in the latter half of the twentieth century contains invaluable insights into a variety of approaches to independent publishing as well as illuminating histories of literary movements of the era. Readers hear directly from editors and publishers including Hettie Jones on Yugen, a journal that brought together the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the New York School poets of the late 1950s; Rosmarie Waldrop on Burning Deck Press, which published titles by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lyn Hejinian, Marjorie Welish, and many others between 1961 and 2017; Alice Notley on the nine issues of Chicago magazine published between 1972 and 1974; Patricia Spears Jones on WB, Ordinary Women, and the Heresies Collective; C. D. Wright on Lost Roads Press; and Lee Ann Brown on Tender Buttons Press.  

  • Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory

    by
    Maureen Murdock
    Published in 2003
    by Seal Press

    “Memory is rarely whole or factually correct.... What we remember is a reconstruction of image and feeling that suits our needs and purposes.” Author and psychotherapist Maureen Murdock begins this two-part book by exploring the mutability of memory and its powerful connection to identity, drawing upon her own experiences with a mother struggling with Alzheimer’s disease and examining works of memoir by authors, such as Isabel Allende, J. M. Coetzee, and Mary Karr. The second part of the book acts as a primer guiding writers through the practical elements of craft with writing exercises and chapters including “Getting Started,” “Universality,” and “Emotional Truth and the Voice of the Narrator.”  

  • Make Us Wave Back: Essays on Poetry and Influence

    by
    Michael Collier
    Published in 2007
    by University of Michigan Press

    “Literary influence...is the story of a writer’s deliberate attempt to find and make something like a literary home,” writes the poet, professor, and former director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in the preface to this collection. Writers seeking to make a literary home of their own will be inspired by Collier’s illuminating essays, written over the course of twenty years, which explore how he has been influenced by authors such as Louise Bogan, Jorge Luis Borges, William Meredith, and Walt Whitman. There are also essays on his experience as poet laureate of the state of Maryland and the importance of being a good reader.

  • Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook

    by
    David Galef
    Published in 2016
    by Columbia University Press

    This handbook is an engaging primer on the art of writing flash fiction. David Galef covers the origins, evolution, and subcategories of the form that include vignettes, prose poems, character sketches, fables, lists, twist stories, surrealism, and metafiction. Each chapter is full of practical tips, techniques, and editing strategies specific to flash fiction, as well as inspiring prompts and exemplary stories by authors, such as Donald Barthelme, Colette, Roxane Gay, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bharati Mukherjee, Sei Shōnagon, Alice Walker, and John Edgar Wideman. “Writing so that every word counts makes for powerful, memorable work,” writes Galef.  

  • The Flexible Lyric

    by
    Ellen Bryant Voigt
    Published in 1999
    by University of Georgia Press

    “Looking closely at a hero’s mortal parts has always been a risky enterprise. We want our great writers pure of heart.” In The Flexible Lyric, poet and professor Ellen Bryant Voigt compiles nine craft essays examining the art of lyric poetry, beginning with a discussion on the creative process and Voigt’s fascination with Flannery O’Connor and Elizabeth Bishop. Each essay that follows examines different aspects of lyric poems, from tone to image to voice and beyond. Through close readings of an array of poets—such as Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Denise Levertov, and Shakespeare—Voigt shows us the nuance and attention it takes to write a fantastic lyric poem.  

  • When Memory Speaks: Exploring the Art of Autobiography

    by
    Jill Ker Conway
    Published in 1999
    by Vintage Books

    From explorations of St. Teresa of Avila and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to George Sand, W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, and Frank McCourt, author and scholar Jill Ker Conway writes an in-depth investigation of memoir writing, tracing its evolution and shedding light on how autobiographical storytelling reflects cultural context and is shaped by social forces, such as gender roles. “Can anyone be both subject and object of the same sentences—the speaker and the subject spoken about?” asks Conway. Throughout the chapters in this book, Conway presents memoir as a powerful form that fosters understanding—illuminating perceptions of the past and providing instructions and insights for the future.   

  • By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry

    by
    Molly McQuade, editor
    Published in 2000
    by Graywolf Press

    This anthology collects critical writing by over two dozen contemporary women poets who share their diverse range of insights, experiences, and perspectives. Written by poets including Lucie Brock-Broido, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Lynn Hejinian, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Sharon Olds, and Adrienne Rich, the essays explore topics such as living the life of a poet, influence and inspiration, race and gender, complex nuances of craft, and poetry’s place in the world.  

  • The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction

    by
    John Dufresne
    Published in 2003
    by W. W. Norton

    Drawing inspiration from the principles of method acting, John Dufresne’s The Lie That Tells a Truth demystifies the writing process and covers the basics of the craft, including how to invent characters, develop a voice, and revise work. Through literary analysis of the works of Anton Chekhov, Frank O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and others, as well as sets of writing exercises for each chapter, Dufresne creates a practical and comprehensive guide with steps on how to become a confident storyteller. As Dufresne writes in the introduction, “No one else can or will give you permission to write, so don’t even ask.” 

  • Understanding the Essay

    by
    Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter, editors
    Published in 2012
    by Broadview Press

    In Understanding the Essay, Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter have gathered the work of a wide range of acclaimed essayists, including James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Jamaica Kincaid, George Orwell, David Foster Wallace, and Virginia Woolf. Each writer is introduced with a contextual biography, followed by a piece by another essayist—such as Eula Biss writing about Anne Carson’s “On Trout,” Patricia Hampl writing about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up,” and Phillip Lopate writing about William Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Hating”—which offers insightful analysis of a specific essay, and refreshing perspectives on the possibilities of the form. “The essay always has an audience in its sights, waiting for someone to turn its pages,” writes Porter in the introduction. “It lives or dies in the mind of the reader.”  

  • The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing

    by
    Sven Birkerts
    Published in 2024
    by Arrowsmith Press

    In this collection of essays, the former director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and the coeditor of the journal Agni reflects on “the old questions, the good questions, the old Heideggerian questions that seem so very basic on the surface, but then you get caught in the implications and realize that they go on and on and that you’ll only go crazy trying to answer them.” Chief among Birkerts’s interrogations is what it means to be a writer today, when so many other mediums compete for an audience. Meditating on smartphones, photography, Jorge Luis Borges, Bob Dylan, and more, Birkerts offers writing— “the right words in the right order”—as a pathway through an increasingly complex labyrinth.  

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