By Diana Tramontano

In honor of National Author's Day (arguably our favorite holiday!), we asked a group of Zibby Books authors about the writers who have inspired them. Their answers are as varied as Stephen King and Zora Neale Hurston. Read on for the full list!

Alisha Fernandez Miranda, My What If Year

Ann M. Martin is the author of The Baby-Sitters Club series, which I devoured as a child. I didn’t often buy new books, so I would troll the library for the latest edition, rush home, and not leave my room until I had finished. The Baby-Sitters Club books cemented my love for reading early (and led to a lucrative teenage career as a babysitter), and for that I’ll be forever appreciative.

Mary Otis, Burst

Two authors that inspired me when I first started writing (and still do) are Alice Munro and Joy Williams. Alice Munro's ability to inhabit and reveal the hidden, complex lives of her characters, her skill in moving forward and backward in time, and her ability to illuminate emotion with depth and precision showed me what was possible in a short story. Joy Williams's writing is ominous and comic, and I am in awe of her spiky observations, ferocity, her ability to upend expectations, and the symbolic poetry of her language.

Megan Tady, Super Bloom

Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, was one of the first female authors I saw writing in a funny, zany voice. This inspired me and gave me permission to do the same.

Patty Lin, The Last Time I Quit

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld was an amazing novel; everything she writes is so well done. If she wrote the phonebook I would read it because she would make it interesting. Her voice is so good. I also loved David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. That’s such a great example of voice in nonfiction. When I read that book, it made me realize that nonfiction didn’t have to be dry and boring.

Sandra Miller, Wednesdays At One

Gillian Flynn is the author of many thriller novels, including Sharp Objects. She got us to care about characters that weren’t always likable and kept the thriller tension throughout the whole book, adding fabulous twists along the way.

Michelle Wildgen, Wine People

Laurie Colwin writes with a lot of wit and lightness but complete precision. She will tell you everything a person does and it’s never boring or easy. It’s light but it’s never without heft. I love how she writes about food in all of her fiction.

Donna Hemans, The House of Plain Truth

I read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston in college. The way she portrayed the community made me think I could write, and I wanted to do the same thing she did. It was the unique language that really drew me in.

Amy Wilson, Slack

Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye is a novel I’ve read three times. It’s about girlhood and being ostracized. In my life, I was both the cause of someone’s deep unhappiness and on the receiving end of it. It can take over one’s life. I’ve never seen these concepts and circumstances written about in a more heartbreakingly honestly way than in this book.

Joselyn Takacs, Pearce Oysters

I read Elif Batuman’s Either/Or a few weeks ago, and this question made me reopen the novel. There was this great sentence about the ocean that I wanted to find. But I couldn’t find that sentence. Instead, I found this:

“Whenever anything made me feel badly, my standard procedure was to recount it to myself as a story in which everyone was at least a little bit right, and some people were kind or humorous, and their kindness and humor redeemed everything, and recognizing it redeemed me. Then I felt humane and objective. But was I humane and objective?”

It’s a perfectly funny description of what writing a novel feels like. I loved reading Either/Or so much that I put the hardcover in a ziplock bag so I could take it on a rafting trip.

Julie Chavez, The Anxiety Library

I love Stephen King because he is a tight, economical writer, and I like the way he crafts his sentences with the minimum amount of information—the opposite of what I do. I love Courtney Maum too. She is an incredible literary citizen. She’s generous, and I love her books.

Susie Lee, Untitled Memoir

I really connected with Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul because I thought it went deeper than a lot of other books I read, and it helped me unlock things about myself. I’m all about bettering myself.

Authors We Appreciate