"In fifth grade, I received The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster and spent the next three days wrapped up in the pages, unable to put it down. It was the first book that grabbed hold of me and didn’t let go. When I was a fifth grade teacher, I would read it aloud to my students every year and watch as the story of Milo and the mysterious Tollbooth grabbed them the way it grabbed me when I was that age. I still have that same weather-worn copy on my book shelf and look forward to the day I can hand it off to my son."

"This would have to be my favorite classic novel. It’s such a beautiful, tragic love story—a book that will just destroy you. And Faulkner’s language is so utterly descriptive. He can write an entire page that consists of only adjectives and two commas. Actually, he’s the reason I ended up passing high school English, because my punctuation was always kind of…eccentric. I would say to my teacher, ‘Well, you know, William Faulkner—he doesn’t use proper punctuation.’ And one of my teachers ended up devising a system with two grades, where you were graded on content and then on whether it was properly written."

"A teacher gave me Flannery O’Connor’s short story collection in the ninth grade. I grew up in a small town where girls were taught to be polite and not laugh too loud or talk too much or show interest in anything that might scare away the boys. It was a revelation to read O’Connor’s work. Here was a woman from a small Georgia town (like me!) who in direct contravention to her sex and social class was writing the kinds of stories that I was not only interested in reading, but wanted to start writing myself. Her bravery and clarity of vision laid an early foundation for my own work."