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
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.
