‘She wrote about subjects you weren’t supposed to write poems about’: Sarah Bridgins on the works that inspired her gut-punch debut collection
Monsters author Claire Dederer on the “brilliant, fierce urgency” of Pearl Cleage’s Mad at Miles
“A clear voice tends to be contagious.” Biography of X author Catherine Lacey on the mysteries of influence
Kevin Maloney: learning to dress up tragedy in fiction and “serve it to the reader in the form of dark comedy”
Marisa Crane: five works that inspired them to create “a complex dystopian world that runs on people’s shame”
Fernando A. Flores on The Quixote Cult, a lost border novel that “depicts a time and place like no other”
Jarred McGinnis: The boundary-pushing American authors who taught this emigrant how to write
Ariel Delgado Dixon: Three influences on Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You
Cara Blue Adams: Denis Johnson’s “lush minimalism” and other influences on You Never Get It Back
Shangyang Fang: Hearing the “meticulous music” in contemporary American poetry
Ray Bradbury: Prophetic visionary, “word-wizard,” and next-door neighbor
Shane McCrae: My war with John Ashbery
Amit Majmudar: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian reminds me of how “more can be more”
Lysley Tenorio: Bharati Mukherjee as catalyst and inspiration
About what could be: C. D. Wright’s impact on Patrick Johnson’s Gatekeeper
Jeffrey Colvin: The wide-ranging influences that helped inspire Africaville
