hi! these are a list of writings that have been influential to me.

poetry

Maya Angelou, "Come, and Be My Baby"
Brendan Joyce, “Value Form”
Andrew Kane, "How to Be a Dog"
June Jordan, "Resolution #1,003"
Ross Gay, Be Holding
Noor Hindi, "Continuance"
Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec
Shangyang Fang, Burying the Mountain
Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ghost Of

essays + articles

Som-Mai Nguyen, "Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility”
Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Marina Keegan, "Why We Care About Whales"
Johanna Hedva, "Sick Woman Theory"
Sam Kriss, "The long, slow, rotten march of progress"
Kenny Lake, "Malcolm X Didn’t Dish Out Free Bean Pies"

short stories

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
Lu Xun, "A Madman's Diary"
Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"
Ding Ling, "Ms. Sophia's Diary"
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories

theory

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Mao Zedong, Five Essays on Philosophy
Mao Zedong, "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art"
George Jackson, Blood in My Eye
Sylvia Wynter, "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom"
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "Anthropology and The Savage Slot”
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property"
Miyako Inoue, “What Does Language Remember?”
Jean Bernabé et al., "In Praise of Creoleness"
Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism

novellas, novels, plays

Ling Ma, Severance
Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger: A Novella and Stories
Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays
Euripides, Medea and Other Plays
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Georg Büchner, Woyzeck
Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile
Aimé Césaire, The Tempest
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Su Tong, Raise the Red Lantern
Ge Fei, Peach Blossom Paradise
Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox