Creative Writing Book List & Authors

Books About Writing We Recommend

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
On Moral Fiction by John Gardner
On Writing by Stephen King
The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Writers We Admire

Novelists
Michael Chabon
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Franzen
Cormac McCarthy
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Toni Morrison
Ann Padgett
John Updike
Kurt Vonnegut
Alice Walker

Short Story Writers:
Anne Beattie
Raymond Carver
Richard Ford
Lorrie Moore
Alice Munro
Joyce Carol Oates
Flannery O’Connor
Tobias Wolff

Creative Nonfiction Writers/Memoirists:
Joan Didion
Annie Dillard
Isak Dineson
Dave Eggers
Loren Eiseley
Mary Karr
Frank McCourt
Norman Maclean
John McPhee
Beryl Markham

Poets:
Scott Cairns
Donald Hall
Jane Kenyon
Galway Kinnell
Yusef Komunyakaa
Ted Kooser
Li-Young Lee
Denise Levertov
Mary Oliver
Paul Willis