It’s impossible to choose. Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Russell Banks, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Louise Erdrich, William Faulkner, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bobbie Ann Mason, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Francine Prose, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf. That’s only a partial list, chosen on the basis of career output. Many of my favorite books are by authors I didn’t list: The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy, The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey, Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kentner, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
Favorite poets (incomplete list): W.H. Auden, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, Martín Espada, Carolyn Forché, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, Dylan Thomas, Adrienne Rich.