This is an old meme, from radical woman of color blogger Professor Susurro: List 25 authors that have influenced you over your life time. (They don’t have to be deep, they just have to have had some impact on your life.) I interpret this to mean that as well as books, novels, stories, essays, poems, the actual interactions with authors which have been very influential for me.
This is something similar to the last meme about poetry books which made us fall in love with poetry (you will see some overlaps here), and also similar enough to Oscar‘s and Rich‘s lists from a few months back about influences and predecessors, though theirs are influences on writing, and this I suppose would be influences on my thinking and writing, or on thinking and therefore on writing.
I’ve been most impacted by authors and their works starting in my later years in college (I finished my undergrad when I was 28) and onward. This really has much to do with finally finding actual mentors/role models for when it became much more clear that not only was I going to be a writer, but that there were specific historical, political, and cultural lenses through which I would be viewing, understanding, and writing the world.
Previously, I grew up fairly lost and undetermined, reading authors who were supposed to be good for me, as prescribed by people who weren’t or didn’t know how to be invested in helping me figure out who I was and what my deepest or most pressing concerns were. I believe this is true for many of us writers of color, multilingual immigrants, non-white feminists, growing up in the American educational system, and with our parents, who have other things to worry about or are not equipped to do so, not necessarily intellectually guiding us along.
As well, over time more works by authors of color were slowly becoming known to me, writing from literary traditions outside of the American mainstream and slowly creeping into NY Times bestseller-dom. This was quite eye-opening and much needed at the time, despite how romanticized some of their portrayals of their own countries and cultures.
