I enjoy reading across genres, but I mostly own poetry books. I love reading YA, nonfiction, and adult fiction, but I don’t usually read them again so I check them out at the library. Essay collections, short story collections, and poetry books are endless sources of inspiration for me. Those are books I like to keep on my shelves. I come back to the books on the top shelf often. I’m also a return reader of literary magazines like Poetry, Tin House, and One Story.
Here are some of my top shelf books:
Coin of the Realm by Carl Phillips
Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler
SanTana’s Fairy Tales by Sarah Rafael García
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison
Beast Meridian by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Hour of the Ox by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
Hum by Jamaal May
All of Ada Limon’s books
In the Garden of the Bridehouse by J. Michael Martinez
mxd kd mixtape by Malcolm Friend
Our Lady of the Ruins by Traci Brimhall
Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky
Under that I have one cubby for Popchyk and two cubbies for poetry books. The other shelves are for miscellaneous books. There’s really no order to them. I have books like:
Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother by Amy Stewart
All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater
Out by Natsuo Kirino
Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Hunger by Roxane Gay
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
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Laura Villareal is from a small town in Texas with more cows than people. She earned an MFA from Rutgers University-Newark. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Apogee, Black Warrior Review, Breakwater Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Freezeray, Reservoir, The Boiler, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and scholarships from The Highlights Foundation, Key West Literary Seminar, and VONA/ Voices. She’s also a reader at Winter Tangerine.
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