Best Books for Writers

In this humorous and informative guide, journalist and editor June Casagrande breaks down the semantics of sentences, and explains how words and grammatical constructions relate to each other in logical and artful ways. A meticulous examination of sentence structure, content, and style, this book reveals the building blocks of successful sentences, and how writers can apply this knowledge to their own work. The easy-to-read manual is filled with short chapters and an appendix on grammar, punctuation, and “most incriminating errors” to help writers avoid them. “We all know bad writing when we see it,” writes Casagrande in the introduction. “Understanding the issues that plague it—that plague all our writing—requires thought, time, a grounding in grammar, and the energy to stop and look at the writer’s guiding question: what am I really trying to say?” 

For this lively and engaging anthology, fifty-seven poets, including Kaveh Akbar, Diane Seuss, Solmaz Sharif, and Ocean Vuong, choose one of their own poems and explain in an essay why it represents their “personal best.” Together the poem-essay pairings provide an insightful look at the life of a poem and the personal experiences that shape the writing process. “We hope the essays here remind that there’s always a singular consciousness behind a poem, a maker with unique feelings and ways of thinking about the world,” the editors write in their introduction. A probing honesty is the common thread that runs through the best essays in the collection, including Danez Smith’s notes on the poem “waiting on you to die so i can be myself,” in which Smith writes, “Let me slow down my language, let me be dissatisfied with what comes first, let me finds the poem that answers to no one, that sings not for the high notes but for the deep, earthly truths.”  

In this collection of essays edited by Joy Castro, twenty-five memoirists explore the complex personal emotions and literary responsibilities writers must negotiate when revealing private information about their families to the reading public. The essays cover a wide range of topics including adoption, sexuality, grief, illness, and cultural identity by authors such as Faith Adiele, Alison Bechdel, Jill Christman, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Rigoberto González, Robin Hemley, Dinty W. Moore, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Mimi Schwartz. “How family members react is not in your hands,” Castro writes in her introduction. “What is in your hands is the narrative: its fidelity to facts as you recall them, its fair-mindedness, its compassion for the straits in which your family members found themselves, its sincere quest to understand what happened.”  

In Writing Down the Bones, painter and writing instructor Natalie Goldberg gives clear, accessible writing advice that approaches the art of writing as spiritual practice. First published in 1986, this thirtieth anniversary edition includes a preface and interview with the author. Goldberg offers guidance and advice throughout the book with short, easy-to-read chapters covering many aspects of the writer’s craft: writing from “first thoughts,” listening deeply, using verbs, overcoming doubts, and even the best places to write. “It is my sincere wish that…students learn how to do writing practice, that they come to know themselves, feel joy in expression, trust what they think. Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you’re free,” writes Goldberg.   

In this collection of essays, award-winning poet Terrance Hayes offers a road map to poetic reading and interpretation, shining a light on the influential works of African American poets. Each of the six sections are titled with provocative questions, such as, “How old is contemporary poetry?” and “How many of your muses rest in peace?” The mix of illustrated micro-essays, graphic book reviews, biographical prose poems, and nonfiction sketches by Hayes enrich the reading experience and imagination of readers. Through personal essays laced with challenging questions, Hayes guides readers through the literary landscape of contemporary poetry so that they can map their own routes. “Like any guidebook, this book should leave the curious reader with more questions than answers,” writes Hayes in the preface.   

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) collects essays by and interviews with more than thirty acclaimed writers, including Camille T. Dungy, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Johnson, Tayari Jones, Elizabeth Nunez, Carl Phillips, Natasha Trethewey, and Jacqueline Woodson, who together offer an inspiring and informative guide to a wide range of writing styles and craft choices. “How We Do It is a kind of selfish gift,” Jericho Brown writes in his introduction. “I want you to have what I always wanted. Here is an anthology that gives us modes to try on the way we might wear and change clothing. And these wonderful writers are proof that nothing ever beat a failure but a try.” Arranged to defy supposed boundaries between genres, the eight sections of the book include insights and observations intended for “anyone who is a student of the craft.”  

In this companion book to The 3 AM Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction, Brian Kiteley, former director of the University of Denver’s creative writing program, offers two hundred more writing prompts to help fiction writers expand their craft. Kiteley begins with personal stories that provide insight into what inspired his teachings and divides the book into three sections—Patterns; Concepts; and People, Places, Things—providing lessons and exercises focused on style, language, character, and more. Also included in the book is an appendix with a list of reference books, advice for teachers and students, and an essay about teaching fiction exercises. The straightforward yet playful mix of lessons and prompts from Kiteley are perfect for creative writing teachers and any writer seeking guidance and inspiration.  

“The essays offered in this important collection not only open the heart to feel and be encouraged, they also demand for the ear to hear, to heed, to receive,” writes Mai Der Vang in the foreword to this anthology of essays written by poets of color about their writing practice. Through varied essay forms and strong, idiosyncratic voices, the essays in this collection offer a multitude of lenses through which one can think through issues of craft. The fifteen essays from poets at various stages of their careers include, “On Reading, and Shame” by Sasha Pimentel, “On Writing From Unincorporated Territory” by Craig Santos Perez, and “My Life Is Not a Stereotype Though Sometimes Writing About it Feels That Way” by Melissa Coss Aquino. This anthology aims to share a bonded experience and to learn from one another’s experiences, as Luisa A. Igloria writes in the introduction: “In this collection, we make no claims of presenting any definitive theoretical or other stance. Neither do we offer these essays as prescriptive of certain ways of thinking of craft or of doing things, although in them is expressed a collective wish—that writers of color find ways to gain strength and visibility.”  

“Consider this: at one time, all the stories we know so well, every line we may have memorized from a poem or a play, all the literature that has shaped our collective imagination, did not exist,” writes award-winning author and teacher Susan Griffin in this step-by-step guide to the creative process. With encouraging words to support writers across genres, this meditative and practical guide is organized into three parts with short chapters “arranged according to an imagined but not always followed (or even appropriate) chronology of the process of writing, from beginning to end.” The first section of the book focuses on the elusive process through which ideas and images form before the writing begins, the second section dives into lessons on how to write gleaned from Griffin’s decades of teaching, and the final section helps writers find organic endings to their work. Threaded throughout the book is an essay titled “How I Learned to Write,” in which Griffin allows readers into her personal journey as a writer. Ideal for writers just beginning or for anyone stuck in their writing, Griffin reminds readers that “human beings are all creative” and “what is important is that you are present to the process.”  

“There has long been a gap in the writing trade,” the editors write in the introduction to this unique volume. “Books written to serve writers offer strategies to fight writer’s block, to enrich the creative imagination, and to seek publication—but offer little about how a work evolves through revision, how it gets clearer, stronger, and deeper, start to finish.” Enter The Art of Revising Poetry, which displays side-by-side sets of first drafts and final versions of poems by Jane Hirshfield, Naomi Shihab Nye, Terry Tempest Williams, and eighteen others to track the precise details of the creative process. The behind-the-scenes look includes full-page reproductions from the poets’ personal notebooks and an essay by each poet about “how and why the poem changed between drafts, how it was expanded, distilled, transformed, revised, and finally released from the labors of change.”   

First published in 1986 and reissued in 2020 to mark what would have been Joseph Brodsky’s eightieth birthday, this collection of essays offers an intimate look into his life and work. The book begins and concludes with a set of autobiographical essays about the Nobel laureate’s difficult life as a poet in Soviet Russia, while other essays include insights on the works of Russian writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Osip Mandelstam as well as other influential poets such as C. P. Cavafy, W. H. Auden, and Eugenio Montale. Brodsky’s close readings of beloved poems are in-depth and comprehensive; in particular his essay titled “On ‘September 1, 1939’ by W. H. Auden,” in which he provides line-by-line commentary of the iconic poem. Brodsky’s mastery of language is unmistakable in this award-winning collection of essays, providing deep analysis of great works and reflections on the life of an artist who survived extraordinary obstacles.