Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

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School

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Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#1501

Beth Bachmann

#128792

Overall Influence

Beth Bachmann is an American poet. Bachmann is Writer in Residence of creative writing at Vanderbilt University. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Tin House, and Ploughshares. They are included in the textbook The Practice of Creative Writing .

#1502

Patricia McFadden

Patricia McFadden

#13978

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Patricia McFadden is a radical African feminist, sociologist, writer, educator, and publisher from eSwatini. She is also an activist and scholar who worked in the anti-apartheid movement for more than 20 years. McFadden has worked in the African and global women’s movements as well. As a writer, she has been the target of political persecution. She has worked as editor of the Southern African Feminist Review and African Feminist Perspectives. She currently teaches, and advocates internationally for women's issues. McFadden has served as a professor at Cornell University, Spelman College, Syracuse University and Smith College in the United States.

#1503

Talvikki Ansel

#123349

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Talvikki Ansel is an American poet. She was chosen as a winner by James Dickey, for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1996. Life She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1985, and Indiana University Bloomington. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies New Young American Poets and The Pushcart Prize XXVI, and in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Journal, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah.

#1504

Emily Ruskovich

#125783

Overall Influence

Emily Ruskovich is an American writer who won the 2019 International Dublin literary award for her novel Idaho. She grew up in the Idaho Panhandle on Hoodoo Mountain. She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2011 and is an assistant professor at the University of Montana where she teaches creative writing; she was formerly on the faculty of Boise State University. She lives in the mountains west of Missoula.

#1505

Olga Humo

#91695

Overall Influence

1919 - 2013 (94 years)

Olga Humo was a Yugoslav partisan, writer and university professor. She was attached to the Partisan Supreme Headquarters as one of the most prominent women fighters and served as personal secretary to communist leader Josip Broz Tito throughout the Second World War. At the same time, her father Momčilo Ninčić was senior minister in the opposing Yugoslav Royal government in-exile in London.

#1506

Ann Bergren

#73923

Overall Influence

1942 - 2018 (76 years)

Ann Bergren was Professor of Greek literature, Literary Theory, and Contemporary Architecture at University of California, Los Angeles. She is known for her scholarship on Ancient Greek language, gender, and contemporary architecture.

#1507

Amaranth Borsuk

#119392

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Amaranth Borsuk is an American poet and educator known for her experiments with textual materiality and digital poetry. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell's School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, where she teaches undergraduate courses on poetry, philology, and experimental writing. She also serves as the Chair of the school's M.F.A. program in Creative Writing, which she co-chaired from 2018 to 2022.

#1508

Shannon Huffman Polson

#96958

Overall Influence

Shannon Huffman Polson is an American writer. In 1995, Polson became one of the first women to fly the Apache attack helicopter in the U.S. Army. Early life Polson was born and reared in Anchorage, Alaska, daughter of an Army JAG officer. She grew up active on the swim team and the debate team, and in her church youth group.

#1509

Lauren Kessler

#34995

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Lauren Kessler is an American author, and immersion journalist who specializes in narrative nonfiction. She teaches storytelling for social change at the University of Washington and for the Forum of Journalism and Media in Vienna.

#1510

Olakunbi Olasope

Olakunbi Olasope

#46037

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Olakunbi Ojuolape Olasope is a Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. She is an expert on Roman social history, Greek and Roman theatre, and Yoruba classical performance culture. Olasope is known in particular for her work on the reception of classical drama in West Africa, especially the work of the Nigerian dramatist Femi Osofisan.

#1511

Morgan Parker

#43367

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Morgan Parker is an American poet, novelist, and editor. She is the author of poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night , There are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé , and Magical Negro , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also author of the young adult novel, Who Put This Song On .

#1512

Erin Belieu

#72977

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Erin Belieu is an American poet. Early life Belieu was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, graduating from Central High School. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where she learned how to construct poetry. Belieu then attended Boston University, and Ohio State University receiving advanced degrees in the area of poetry.

#1513

Prageeta Sharma

#127120

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Prageeta Sharma is an American poet. She is the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College. Life Sharma is the author of the poetry collections Grief Sequence , Undergloom , Infamous Landscapes , The Opening Question , which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Bliss to Fill .

#1514

Edvige Giunta

#79152

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Edvige Giunta is a Sicilian-American writer, educator, and literary critic. Biography She was born in Gela, Sicily, in 1959, the second of four children of Vincenzo and Cettina Giunta, both schoolteachers. After earning a degree in foreign languages and literature at the University of Catania in 1983, she moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the University of Miami. She received a master's degree in English in 1987 and a Ph.D. in 1989. She wrote her dissertation on James Joyce and her first book was titled A Raven Like a Writing-Desk: Lewis Carroll through James Joyce's Lo...

#1515

Daisy Hernández

#119232

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Daisy Hernández is a writer and editor in the United States. She coedited the essay collection Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism , and in 2014 published A Cup of Water Under My Bed, a memoir about growing up queer in a Colombian-Cuban family. Hernández is an assistant professor at Northwestern University.

#1516

Devoney Looser

#93481

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Devoney Kay Looser is an American literary critic and Jane Austen scholar. She is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, where she focuses on women's writing and the history of the novel.

#1517

Sarah Henstra

#122819

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Sarah Henstra is a Canadian writer and academic. A professor of English literature and creative writing at Toronto Metropolitan University . She is most noted for her 2018 novel The Red Word, which won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2018 Governor General's Awards.

#1518

Hauwa Ali

#94391

Overall Influence

Hauwa Ali was a Nigerian writer known for her novels exploring the lives of Muslim women and raising questions about Islamic values and women's independence. Her best-known novel, Destiny, won the Delta prize for fiction.

#1519

Celia Correas de Zapata

#118913

Overall Influence

1933 - 2022 (89 years)

Celia Correas de Zapata was an Argentine academic, poet, and author, and a leading scholar of the history of Latin American women writers. She was a professor of literature at San Jose State University, and was director of the 1976 Conference of Inter-American Women Writers, one of the earliest U.S. conferences in this field.

#1520

Michaela DePrince

#41232

Overall Influence

1995 - Present (29 years)

Michaela Mabinty DePrince is a Sierra Leonean-American ballet dancer, currently dancing with the Boston Ballet. She rose to fame after starring in the documentary First Position in 2011, following her and other young ballet dancers as they prepared to compete at the Youth America Grand Prix. With her adoptive mother, Elaine DePrince, she authored the book Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina. DePrince formerly danced with the Dance Theatre of Harlem as the youngest dancer in the history of the company and was a former soloist with the Dutch National Ballet. Since 2016, Michaela is...

#1521

Lisa Kron

#88030

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Elizabeth S. "Lisa" Kron is an American actress and playwright. She is best known for writing the lyrics and book to the musical Fun Home for which she won both the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. Fun Home was also awarded the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015 and the 2014 Obie Award for writing for musical theater.

#1522

Cynthia Macdonald

Cynthia Macdonald

#113068

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Cynthia Lee Macdonald was an American poet, educator, and psychoanalyst. Life Macdonald was born in Manhattan to screenwriter Leonard Macdonald and his wife Dorothy Kiam Macdonald. She earned a B.A. in English from Bennington College in 1950 and pursued studies in voice at the Mannes School of Music in 1951-1952. She pursued a career in opera and concert singing from 1953-1966. After changing her focus to poetry, Macdonald received a master's degree in writing and literature from Sarah Lawrence College.

#1523

Carrie Etter

#85434

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Carrie Etter is an American poet. Life Originally from Normal, Illinois, she moved to Southern California at the age of 19, and on to London in 2001. Etter holds a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MFA, MA and PhD from the University of California, Irvine. She was a visiting lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire for 2003–2004, teaching short-story writing and literature.

#1524

Mary Luckhurst

#56581

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Mary Luckhurst is a writer, academic, and theatre director. She is Professor of Theatre and Performance and is the first female Head of the School of Arts at the University of Bristol. She is known for her academic and educational work in the arts in universities and the public realm and for her championing of women’s equality and human rights. She is currently working on projects about female performers who challenge the stigmas of ageing, disability and mental health.

#1525

Kim McLarin

#105136

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Kim McLarin is an American novelist, best known for Growing Up X: A Memoir by the Daughter of Malcolm X, co-authored with Ilyasah Shabazz, and Jump at the Sun. Her works include contemporary novels, short stories and non-fiction.

#1526

Judith T. Zeitlin

#136917

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Judith T. Zeitlin is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her areas of interest are Ming-Qing literary and cultural history, with specialties in the classical tale and drama. In 2011 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

#1527

Francesca Rhydderch

Francesca Rhydderch

#122946

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Francesca Rhydderch is a Welsh novelist and academic. In 2013, her debut novel, The Rice Paper Diaries, was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2014 for Fiction. Her short stories have been published in anthologies and magazines and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Wales.

#1528

Nicole Cooley

#109971

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Nicole Ruth Cooley is an American poet. She has authored six collections of poems, including Resurrection, Breach, Milk Dress, and Of Marriage. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Field, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, The Paris Review, PEN America, The Missouri Review, and The Nation. She co-edited, with Pamela Stone, the "Mother" issue of Women's Studies Quarterly.

#1529

Iolanda Batallé

Iolanda Batallé

#110922

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Iolanda Batallé is a Catalan writer and editor. She has been the Director of Institut Ramon Llull between 2018 and 2021. She is now director of Ona Llibres since 2022. Biography Born in Barcelona in 1971, Batallé is a Graduate in English Philology and has a Master's in Business Administration from the ESADE Business School and the University of Berkeley.

#1530

Nicole Ward Jouve

#97957

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Nicole Ward Jouve is a French writer and literary critic, who writes in both French and English. For most of her career Ward Jouve lived and worked in England. She is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of York.

#1531

Laure-Anne Bosselaar

#88478

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a Belgian-American poet, translator, professor, and former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, These Many Rooms . Her collection, Small Gods of Grief , won the 2001 Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. A New Hunger, was an American Library Association Notable Book in 2008. She is the author of Artémis, a collection of French poems, published in Belgium. Her chapbook Rooms Remembered appeared from Sungold Editions in 2018.

#1532

Alison Calder

#95625

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Alison Calder is a Canadian poet, literary critic and educator. Biography Calder was born in London, England on 21 December 1969 and grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. She studied at the University of Saskatchewan, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts, and at the University of Western Ontario where she earned an Master of Arts and a PhD in English Literature. She was also a Distinguished Junior Scholar in Residence at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia.

#1533

Kirsten Greenidge

Kirsten Greenidge

#85605

Overall Influence

Kirsten Greenidge is an American playwright. Her plays are known for their realistic language and focus on social issues such as the intersectionality of race, gender, and class. Her sister is the historian Kerri Greenidge.

#1534

Corinne Demas

#70827

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Corinne Demas is the award winning author of five novels, two collections of short stories, a collection of poetry, a memoir, two plays, and numerous books for children. She has published more than fifty short stories in a variety of magazines and literary journals. Her publications before 2000 are under the name Corinne Demas Bliss.

#1535

Tobe Levin

#58482

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Tobe Levin Freifrau von Gleichen , a multi-lingual scholar, translator, editor and activist, is an Associate of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University; a Visiting Research Fellow at the International Gender Studies Centre, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford; an activist against female genital mutilation and professor of English Emerita at the University of Maryland, University College.

#1536

Adalcinda Camarão

#103541

Overall Influence

1914 - 2005 (91 years)

Adalcinda Magno Camarão Luxardo was a Brazilian writer, educator and composer. Biography Adalcinda Magno Camarão Luxardo was born in Muaná, Marajó, July 18, 1914. She was the daughter of João Evangelista de Carvalho Camarão and Camila de Brito Magno Camarão. She was educated at Colégio Pedro II and also at the Instituto de Educação.

#1537

Sylvia Iparraguirre

Sylvia Iparraguirre

#50112

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Sylvia Iparraguirre is an Argentine novelist and human rights activist. She is a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. Biographic Overview She was born in Junín, Buenos Aires. Her novel Tierra del Fuego: Una Biografia del Fin del Mundo won the 1999 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for women writers in Spanish. It is a fictionalised account of the life of Jemmy Button.

#1538

Diana Ross

#49441

Overall Influence

1910 - 2000 (90 years)

Diana Patience Beverly Ross was an English children's author. A graduate of the Central School of Art in London, she also worked on sculpture and graphic arts and illustrated several of her own books under the name of her cat, Gri.

#1539

Maggie Smith

#76763

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Maggie Smith is an American poet, freelance writer, and editor who lives in Bexley, Ohio. Smith's poem "Good Bones," originally published in the journal Waxwing in June 2016, has been widely circulated on social media and read by an estimated one million people. A Wall Street Journal story in May 2020 described it as "keeping the realities of life's ugliness from young innocents," citing that the poem has gone viral after catastrophes such as the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, the May 2017 suicide bombing at a concert in Manchester, U.K., the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, and the coronavirus pandemic.

#1540

Clare Lees

#101732

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Clare A. Lees is professor of medieval literature and history of the language, and Director of the Institute of English Studies, University of London. Education Lees earned her Bachelor of Arts and master's degree at the University of Leeds before earning her PhD at the University of Liverpool.

#1541

Lydia Vasikova

#104248

Overall Influence

1927 - 2012 (85 years)

Lydia Petrovna Vasikova was a Soviet and Russian Finno-Ugric linguist, the first among Mari women, who became a Doctor of Science , a professor , an Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation , and a holder of the Order of the Cross of the Land of Mary .

#1542

Brenda Coultas

#72395

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Brenda Coultas is an American poet. Life She was raised in Indiana, often working odd jobs such as welding. She graduated from Naropa University, studying with Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg. Coultas also taught at Naropa University.

#1543

Miriam Allott

#113713

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

Miriam Allott or Miriam Farris; Miriam Farris Allott; Miriam Allott-Farris was an English literary scholar. She was a professor in Liverpool and at Birkbeck College. Life Allott was born in Cairo or Fulham in 1920. This was just after her father Labib Farris who was an Egyptian medical student and her mother Ada Violet Rennie married. She studied in Cairo and the Froebel Demonstration School at the same time as Iris Murdoch. She then went to Liverpool University. After her degree in general studies she taught and studied for a doctorate in English literature on Henry James. She was supervised by her future husband, Kenneth Allott.

#1544

Cara Black

#80372

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Cara Black is a bestselling American mystery writer. She is best known for her Aimée Leduc mystery novels featuring a female Paris-based private investigator. Black is included in the Great Women Mystery Writers by Elizabeth Lindsay 2nd edition. Her first novel Murder in the Marais was nominated for an Anthony Award for best first novel and the third novel in the series, Murder in the Sentier, was Anthony-nominated for Best Novel.

#1545

Colleen J. McElroy

#101724

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Colleen J. McElroy is an American poet, short story writer, editor, memoirist. Life She graduated from Kansas State University and from the University of Washington with a Ph.D. . She is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

#1546

Page duBois

#125264

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Page DuBois is professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is known for her work in Ancient Greek literature, feminist theory and psychoanalysis.

#1547

Janet Kaplan

#75090

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Janet Kaplan is an American poet and professor. She is the author of four full-length books: The Groundnote , "The Glazier’s County," winner of the 2003 Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press, Dreamlife of the Philanthropist: Prose Poems & Prose Sonnets, winner of the 2011 Ernest Sandeen Prize , and "Ecotones" .

#1548

Zoë Brigley

#117021

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Zoë Brigley or Zoë Brigley Thompson is a Welsh poet, editor of Poetry Wales, and assistant professor in the Department of English of Ohio State University. Biography Brigley was born in 1981 and grew up in Caerphilly in the Rhymney Valley. She has a BA , MA and PhD from the University of Warwick. Her doctoral thesis was titled: Exile and ecology : the poetic practice of Gwyneth Lewis, Pascale Petit and Deryn Rees-Jones. She won a 2003 Eric Gregory Award, an award given by the Society of Authors for a collection by a poet aged under 30.

#1549

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

#81881

Overall Influence

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is an American writer, best known for her debut novel Wench: A Novel , which became a bestseller. She is chair of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation Board of Directors. Early life and education Dolen Perkins-Valdez attended Harvard College as an undergraduate, earning a BA degree. She completed a PhD in English at George Washington University in Washington, DC.

#1550

Mary Kay Zuravleff

#123375

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Mary Kay Zuravleff is an American short story writer and novelist. Life She was born in Syracuse, New York. She graduated from Rice University, and from Johns Hopkins University. She taught at Johns Hopkins University, Goucher College, the University of Maryland, and George Mason University. She was writer in residence at American University. She won the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the James Jones First Novel Award. She is on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She lives in Washington, D.C.

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