Geoffrey, thanks for the opportunity to do this. In no particular order I list:
1. Maxine Hong-Kingston: for Woman Warrior, and for every word she wrote / uttered in its defense.
2. Maya Angelou: for every bit of her pain and triumphs she has shared with women all over the world.
3. James Baldwin: for just about every angry, bitter word he dared to write.
4. Raymond Carver: for his effortless combinations of strange and ordinary.
5. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels was a childhood favorite, and became even more significant when I read it as an adult.
6. Margaret Atwood: Handmaid's Tale was my first introduction to "feminist dystopia."
7. Chinua Achebe: for presenting a condition in Anthills of the Savannah in which I found solidarity. And for Things Fall Apart, of course.
8. Alice Walker: for the women in Color Purple
9. Gloria Naylor: for The Women of Brewster Place.
10. V. S. Naipaul: Miguel Street enlivened my high school lit. experience.
11. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: for teaching me about the power of signifyin'.
12. Richard Wright: Native Son is the most problematic and most memorable novel I've ever read about the condition of black men in America.
13. Jamaica Kincaid: for ridiculing colonialism with plain-spoken eloquence.
14. Toni Morrison: The beauty of analyzing her work lies in my belief that no matter how much I dig I'll never exhaust any of it.
15. J. M. Coetzee: for making a middle-aged, white, male South-African who sleeps with his female black student, and then stalks her until she drops out of school, appear sympathetic.
16. Charles Dickens: for his male characters.
17. Emily Bronte: I read Wuthering Heights as a young girl, and it helped me create an image of a man that no real man could match.
18. Charlotte Bronte: I read Jane Eyre as a young girl as well (see comment above).
19. George Orwell: for everything.
20. George Eliot: for Mill on the Floss.
21. T. S. Eliot: for The Wasteland, and "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock."
22. Theodore Dreiser: for Sister Carrie.
23. Anzia Yezierska: for her anger, and her female Jewish characters.
24. Jean Toomer: for the voiceless "portraits" of women in Cane.
25. Grace Paley: for everything.
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Tagged: Andre, Annand, Blade Runner, Brass, Kwesi, Lloyd, Malcolm, Marcus, Nicholas, Raptus, Ruel, Silver Dragon, Stolid.
[If I tagged you, you are now obligated to provide your list of 25, or the blog-meme demons will infest your site and make it impossible for you to write another intelligent word.]
