About what could be: C. D. Wright’s impact on Patrick Johnson’s Gatekeeper

Jeffrey Colvin: The wide-ranging influences that helped inspire Africaville

Baldwin and Merwin: Matthew Zapruder’s guiding spirits in Father’s Day

Kimberly King Parsons salutes Eileen Myles, Denis Johnson, and other voices she “would follow anywhere”

Liza Wieland: From Dickinson to Mary Oliver, a lineage of poets behind Paris, 7 A.M.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine: the “old universal truths” of Chicano pioneer Arturo Islas

Sarah Pinsker: Octavia Butler, Woody Guthrie, and other classics that inspired my debut

Forrest Gander: Writing from the edge of the abyss—the books that influenced Be With

Ling Ma: William Maxwell, Bret Easton Ellis, and how fiction can do the impossible

Alexia Arthurs: Jamaica Kincaid’s lesson in “doing and being and desiring without permission”

Cheston Knapp: Weird, feral Ralph Waldo Emerson, wily William Gass, and other influences on Up Up, Down Down

Morgan Jerkins: Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist made me believe that I could be honest

Carmen Maria Machado: American classics that influenced Her Body and Other Parties

Eugene Lim: American classics that influenced Dear Cyborgs, mostly in pairs

Julie Buntin: Liberated by Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Nick Norwood: What Carson McCullers knew about cotton mills and misery