Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia’s writing is very anchored in the body and creates strong visceral emotions in readers. I recommend starting with her memoir The Chronology of Water, breaks genre and chronology conventions in writing.
Virginia Woolf
My first Virginia Woolf read, The Waves, has completely changed how I view (novel) writing, and myself. Stream of consciousness at its best.
Deborah Tall
I’ve only read one book by her but I feel a strong connection between her voice and my own. “A Family of Strangers” is a lyrical memoir made from fragments that seem to reflect the limited, fractured nature of memory, time, and what we can know about other people, even those we stem from.
Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti’s “Motherhood” is a contemporary novel that articulates well the challenges women face in terms of embracing/refusing to embrace an established social narrative about feminity that may not necessarily fit all women. I would love to read more of her work.
Carmen Bugan
Carmen Bugan writes poetry and memoir. In “Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police” she writes about her childhood and her family’s experience of communism through an intimate lens; it is a story of oppression but also a family story.
Diana Radovan PhD ELS is a multigenre, Romanian-born writer (of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and hybrid forms) and teacher of writing living in Munich, Germany. Nature, wilderness, voice, and the crossing of borders play a crucial role in her writing and her creative practice. Her work has been published broadly across languages and borders since 2004. She is the founder of the multicultural writing group Creative Writing in Munich and a Sarah Selecky Writing School Faculty member. In recent years, she has actively engaged in a number of collaborations with other writers and visual artists living in Munich. Currently she is working on her first book, a hybrid experimental memoir spanning three generations. Read more about her and discover her awards and publications at dianaradovan.com.