On Writers


Great writers are always in conversation with one another, whether personally or through their work. In the stories, poems, and essays below, emerging and established literary authors respond to the writers who have inspired them, infuriated them, and defined them.

  • Tom Grimes

    Mentor

    Like a novelist who never outlines a book, I’d never plotted my future.

  • Andre Dubus III

    My Father Was a Writer

    It was the six of us: my young parents and all four of us kids.

  • W. S. Merwin

    Letter to Ruth Stone

    2013 International Zbigniew Herbert Prize

  • Heather Brittain Bergstrom

    Reading Henry James in the Suburbs

  • Chris Abani

    A Letter to Robert Pinsky

  • Tobias Wolff

    Reconsidering Paul Bowles

  • Marvin Bell

    Poem after Carlos Drummond de Andrade