Black Quote by Donald Ray Pollock

As a writer, I was shaped by a desire to write for black people. That things were not being represented. That was my motivating…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

The biggest influence on my books was the fact that I had worked in a newspaper for so long. In a daily paper, you…

— Maeve Binchy

I started writing in the '90s, so I was free to just have an eccentric career and not conform to some idea of what…

— Colson Whitehead

My writing is definitely influenced by and speaks to African-Americans because that is who I am. I'm black. I'm a black woman. I'm a…

— Michelle Singletary

And as a young black man, a lot of my professors would really think that it was useful to see the work of politically…

— Kehinde Wiley

At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published.…

— Walter Mosley

I got into the business because I love writing. When it came down to finding my voice, which every writer has to take time…

— Lena Waithe

Writing has been one of the most powerful influences in my life and it always has been since I was a little girl.

— Evangeline Lilly

The fact that my students could be in a little college in a little college town on the coast of Rhode Island, and be…

— Adam Braver

When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never…

— Jenny Zhang

“I delved especially into black writers. Their analogies were relevant to my own experiences, and I understood them better for that.”

— Tepilit Ole Saitoti

My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as…

— August Wilson