Authors, Writers, and Poets!

Oooh, this will be a bit tricky. I'll try to break down my influences to my best ability.

Poetry: Charles Pierre Baudelaire, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Ashley M. Jones.

Fiction:

a) Fantasy: Robin McKinley, Brian Jacques, Lloyd Alexander, Cinda Williams Chima, N.M. Browne, Nancy Springer, David Clement-Davies, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.K. Rowling, and C.S. Lewis.
b) Horror: Kate Cary and Tim Bowler.
c) Science: Scott Westerfeld and Isaac Asimov.
d) Historical: Dog Boy, What I Saw and How I Lied, City of Thieves, Child 44, Daniel Half-Human: And the Good Nazi, My Last Skirt: The Story of Jennie Hodgers, Union Soldier, and Dawn Rider.
e)Other: Avi, Johnathan Swift, Marguerite Henry, Walter Farley, Laurie Halse Anderson, The Death of Jason Porter, and Jack London.

Comics: LeyLines and Ghost World.

I have read a plethora of nonfiction books over the years, including those on writing, but two of my favorites on the subject of writing were Stephen King's On Writing and Danse Macabre. Of course, if anyone needs suggestions on encyclopedias to read about animals, I'm also your person for that.

Poet? Has to be Edgar Allen Poe. I swear, he has to be the best poet ever! I'm in love with a lot of his stuff. Maybe I'll get a poster with snippets from his work...

Authors? Hm, Rachel Caine, Julie Kagawa, L.J. Smith, Christopher Pike... Some of their books are the best books I have ever read. You know the type that can actually evoke emotion in you? Connect you to the character and just actually manage to get you annoyed when the character does something REALLY stupid.

And if I am going to be honest, I'll have to credit some YWSers on their work, seriously, some of you have potential to change the way the world thinks.
-Coffee Stains by creativityrules
-I Imagined Death by StoryWeaver13
Had to give credit to these, I seriously loved them and they deserve to be mentioned even if they are not official authors... yet.

That's my list!

Pretty much any writer I read. If I've been reading Brian Jacques, my prose will sound like him; while I'm reading Lois Bujold I find my thoughts styling themselves like her narration.

Well, I like reading, and I read really fast, so I read a lot. And until now I hadn't realized that I can't remember any of the authors' names xD

Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, John Steinbeck -- that's about it.

Woot woot clarity! Edgar Allan Poe for the win! I'm taking a independent study on him starting in a week... sooo excited!

Franz Kafka showed me that the best writing is the kind that flows straight from our veins. Reading his works is my therapy. He is peerless in the art of navigating alienation and pure human interaction, and is the only author I know that can make a novel seem like a parable. For that, I can confidently affirm that he is the single best writer of the last two to three hundred years. If you doubt me, read a work of his, and if you have already, read more.

Runners up: Faulkner, and Conrad. Their writing is beautiful. But no one can touch Kafka.

Fiction

Kazuo Ishiguro
Chinua Achebe
Jennifer Egan
James Joyce
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Lethem
Martin Amis
Haruki Murakami

Non-Fiction

David Foster Wallace (obviously)
Pankaj Mishra