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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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#1151

John Rechy

#22200

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

John Francisco Rechy is a Mexican-American novelist and essayist. His novels are written extensively about gay culture in Los Angeles and wider America, among other subject matter. City of Night, his debut novel published in 1963, was a best seller. Drawing on his own background, he has contributed to Mexican-American literature, notably with his novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, which has been taught in several Chicano studies courses throughout the United States. But, even after the success of his first novel, he still worked as a prostitute, teaching during the day, and hustling at night.

#1152

Sigrid Nunez

#24265

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Sigrid Nunez is an American writer, best known for her novels. Her seventh novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. Biography Sigrid Nunez was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. She received her BA from Barnard College and her MFA from Columbia University , after which she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books. Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, and What Are You Going Through. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.

#1153

Meir Wieseltier

#23281

Overall Influence

1941 - 2023 (82 years)

Meir Wieseltier was an Israeli poet and translator. Biography Meir Wieseltier was born in Moscow in 1941, shortly before the German invasion of Russia. He was taken to Novosibirsk in southwestern Siberia by his mother and two older sisters. His father was killed while serving in the Red Army in Leningrad. After two years in Poland, Germany, and France, the family immigrated to Israel. Wieseltier grew up in Netanya.

#1154

Tom Raworth

#17404

Overall Influence

1938 - 2017 (79 years)

Thomas Moore Raworth was an English-Irish poet, publisher, editor, and teacher who published over 40 books of poetry and prose during his life. His work has been translated and published in many countries. Raworth was a key figure in the British Poetry Revival.

#1155

Geoffrey Wolff

#25370

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Geoffrey Wolff is an American novelist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer. Among his honors and recognition are the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships of the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy in Berlin , and the Guggenheim Foundation. His younger brother Tobias Wolff is also an award-winning writer.

#1156

Sally Morgan

#14820

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Sally Jane Morgan is an Australian Aboriginal author, dramatist, and artist. Her works are on display in numerous private and public collections in Australia and around the world. Early life, education, and personal life Morgan was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1951 as the eldest of five children. She was raised by her mother Gladys and her maternal grandmother Daisy. Her mother, a member of the Bailgu people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, grew up in the Parkerville Children's Home as part of the Stolen Generations. Her father, William, a plumber by trade, died after a long-term battle with post-war experience post-traumatic stress disorder.

#1157

Michèle Roberts

#23744

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Michèle Brigitte Roberts FRSL is a British writer, novelist and poet. She is the daughter of a French Catholic teacher mother and English Protestant father , and has dual UK–France nationality. Early life Roberts was born to a French Catholic mother and English Protestant father in Bushey, Hertfordshire, but raised in Edgware, Middlesex. She was educated at a convent, expecting to become a nun, before reading English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she lost her Catholic faith. She also studied at University College London, training to be a librarian. She worked for the British Council i...

#1158

Nathan Englander

Nathan Englander

#17931

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Nathan Englander is an American short story writer and novelist. His debut short story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was published by Alfred A. Knopf, in 1999. His second collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, won the 2012 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

#1159

Seanan McGuire

#15949

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Seanan McGuire is an American author and filker. McGuire is known for her urban fantasy novels. She uses the pseudonym Mira Grant to write science fiction/horror and the pseudonym A. Deborah Baker to write the "Up-and-Under" children's portal fantasy series.

#1160

Jon Juaristi

#29859

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jon Juaristi Linacero is a Spanish poet, essayist and translator in Spanish and Basque, as well as a self-confessed former ETA militant. He lives in Madrid. Biography Education and employment A Ph.D. in Romance philology, he studied at the University of Deusto and in Seville.

#1161

Howard Nemerov

#11914

Overall Influence

1920 - 1991 (71 years)

Howard Nemerov was an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. For The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov , he won the National Book Award for Poetry, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize.

#1162

Gayl Jones

#27123

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Gayl Carolyn Jones is an American writer from Lexington, Kentucky. She is recognized as a key figure in 20th-century African-American literature. Jones published her debut novel, Corregidora , at the age of 25. The book, edited by Toni Morrison, was met with critical acclaim and praised by leading intellectuals including James Baldwin and John Updike. Her sophomore novel Eva's Man was met with less renown and characterized as "dangerous" by some critics for its raw depiction of cruelty and violence. Jones continued publishing in the late 1990s, releasing The Healing and Mosquito—the former of which was shortlisted for the National Book Award.

#1163

Sudeep Sen

#28604

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Sudeep Sen is an Indian English poet and editor. Early life He was educated at St Columba's School in Delhi and received a degree in English literature from Hindu College, University of Delhi. He received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. Sen also received a master's degree in English and creative writing from Hollins University, and was an international scholar at Davidson College. From 1992 to 1993 he was international poet-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, and in 1995 he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

#1164

Jean-Marie Apostolidès

Jean-Marie Apostolidès

#7565

Overall Influence

1943 - 2023 (80 years)

Jean-Marie Apostolidès was a French novelist, essayist, playwright, theatre director, and university professor. Biography Apostolidès was born during World War II in the village of Saint-Bonnet-Tronçais in Auvergne. His grandfather, Evangel Apostolidès, was a Greek doctor from Asia Minor. After his studies in France, Evangel did not return home because of the rise to power of Mustafa Kemal. The childhood of Jean-Marie Apostolidès was profoundly marked by religion and its dogma; when his father Paul found out his parents had lived together without being married, he was horrified, and decided to "pay for their sins" by becoming a fervent Catholic.

#1165

Mazisi Kunene

#23084

Overall Influence

1930 - 2006 (76 years)

Mazisi Kunene was a South African poet best known for his translation of the epic Zulu poem Emperor Shaka the Great. While in exile from South Africa's apartheid regime, Kunene was an active supporter and organiser of the anti-apartheid movement in Europe and Africa. He would later teach at University of California, Los Angeles , and become Africa's and South Africa's first poet laureate.

#1166

Merete Mazzarella

Merete Mazzarella

#51072

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Merete Mazzarella is a Swedo-Finnish prize-winning author and literature researcher. Life and work Mazzarella's mother was Danish, and father a Finnish ambassador. Her father's mother tongue was Finnish, but they spoke Swedish at home for practical reasons. Mazzarella learnt about Finland Swedish culture through literature.

#1167

Scott Kim

#9262

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Scott Kim is an American puzzle and video game designer, artist, and author of Korean descent. He started writing an occasional "Boggler" column for Discover magazine in 1990, and became an exclusive columnist in 1999, and created hundreds of other puzzles for magazines such as Scientific American and Games, as well as thousands of puzzles for computer games. He was the holder of the Harold Keables chair at Iolani School in 2008.

#1168

Leonard Neidorf

#22117

Overall Influence

Leonard Neidorf is an American philologist who is Professor of English at Nanjing University. Neidorf specializes in the study of Old English and Middle English literature, and is a known authority on Beowulf.

#1169

Ron Hansen

#17785

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Ron Hansen is an American novelist, essayist, and professor. He is known for writing literary westerns exploring the people and history of the American heartland, notably The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford , which was adapted into an acclaimed film.

#1170

John Guillory

#25741

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

John David Guillory is an American literary critic best known for his book Cultural Capital . He is the Julius Silver Professor of English at New York University. Life Guillory "grew up in New Orleans in a working-class Catholic family, and attended Jesuit schools." Guillory gained his BA at Tulane University, and a PhD in English from Yale University in 1979. His PhD, Poetry and Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History, was subsequently published as a monograph. Guillory taught at Yale University , Johns Hopkins University , and Harvard University before moving to New York Universit...

#1171

William Hansen

#38013

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

William Hansen is an American academic who is a professor emeritus of classical studies and folklore at Indiana University Bloomington. Education and career Hansen earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1965 and his PhD in 1970 from the University of California, Berkeley in classical studies.

#1172

Harryette Mullen

Harryette Mullen

#32639

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Harryette Mullen , Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles, is an American poet, short story writer, and literary scholar. Life Mullen was born in Florence, Alabama, grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, and attended graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As of 2008, she lives in Los Angeles, California. Mullen's most recent work is Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary.

#1173

Donald Margulies

Donald Margulies

#10746

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Donald Margulies is an American playwright and academic. In 2000, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Dinner with Friends. Background and education Margulies attended John Dewey High School in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Purchase College where he received a BFA in Visual Arts. Margulies lives with his wife, Lynn Street, a physician, and their son, Miles, in New Haven, Connecticut.

#1174

John McGahern

#18566

Overall Influence

1934 - 2006 (72 years)

John McGahern was an Irish writer and novelist. He is regarded as one of the most important writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Known for the detailed dissection of Irish life found in works such as The Barracks, The Dark and Amongst Women, he was hailed by The Observer as "the greatest living Irish novelist" and in its obituary The Guardian described him as "arguably the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett".

#1175

Chris Carter

#24901

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Christopher Carl Carter is an American television and film producer, director and writer who gained fame in the 1990s as the creator of the Fox science fiction supernatural drama series The X-Files.

#1176

Ashley Bryan

#20392

Overall Influence

1923 - 2022 (99 years)

Ashley Frederick Bryan was an American writer and illustrator of children's books. Most of his subjects are from the African-American experience. He was U.S. nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2006 and he won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his contribution to American children's literature in 2009. His picture book Freedom Over Me was short-listed for the 2016 Kirkus Prize and received a Newbery Honor.

#1177

Heinz Wismann

#34193

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Heinz Wismann is a Franco-German philologist and philosopher. Biography Heinz Wismann is the son of Heinz Wismann , an art historian, who was director of the Ministry of Education and Propaganda and vice-president of the Chamber of Literature of the Third Reich from 1935 to 1937.

#1178

Tom Hull

#13140

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Tom Hull is an American music critic, web designer, and former software developer. Hull began writing criticism for The Village Voice in the mid 1970s under the mentorship of its music editor Robert Christgau, but left the field to pursue a career in software design and engineering during the 1980s and 1990s, which earned him the majority of his life's income. In the 2000s, he returned to music reviewing and wrote a jazz column for The Village Voice in the manner of Christgau's "Consumer Guide", alongside contributions to Seattle Weekly, The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, NPR Music, and the we...

#1179

Louis Nowra

#21541

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Mark Doyle, better known by his stage name Louis Nowra, is an Australian writer, playwright, screenwriter and librettist. He is best known as one of Australia's leading playwrights. His works have been performed by all of Australia's major theatre companies, including Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company, Queensland Theatre Company, State Theatre Company of South Australia, Belvoir, and many others, and have also had many international productions. His most significant plays are Così, Radiance , Byzantine Flowers, Summer of the Aliens and The Golden Age. In 2006 he completed The ...

#1180

Helen Tiffin

#28964

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Helen M. Tiffin is an adjunct professor of English at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and an influential writer in post-colonial theory and literary studies. Tiffin returned to Australia from Canada to take up her present post at the University of Tasmania. She was formerly Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in English and Post-Colonial Studies at Queen's University. Prior to her move to Canada, Tiffin held the post of Professor in the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History at the University of Queensland, where she was a founder member of the Postcolonial Re...

#1181

Esther Allen

#24198

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Esther Allen is a writer, professor, and translator of French-language and Spanish-language literature into English. She is on the faculties of Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY . Allen co-founded PEN World Voices: the New York Festival of International Literature , and worked with PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants from their inception in 2003 to 2010. Allen heads the Development Committee of the American Literary Translators Association, and serves on the board of Writers Omi, part of Omi International Arts Center, on the Advisory Council to the Spanish-language program at the CUN...

#1182

Sorley MacLean

#18079

Overall Influence

1911 - 1996 (85 years)

Sorley MacLean was a Scottish Gaelic poet, described by the Scottish Poetry Library as "one of the major Scottish poets of the modern era" because of his "mastery of his chosen medium and his engagement with the European poetic tradition and European politics". Nobel Prize Laureate Seamus Heaney credited MacLean with saving Scottish Gaelic poetry.

#1183

Kwame Dawes

#16395

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Kwame Senu Neville Dawes is a Ghanaian poet, actor, editor, critic, musician, and former Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina. He is now Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and editor-in-chief at Prairie Schooner magazine.

#1184

Flora Nwapa

#21673

Overall Influence

1931 - 1993 (62 years)

Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa , was a Nigerian author who has been called the mother of modern African Literature. She was the forerunner to a generation of African women writers, and the first African woman novelist to be published in the English language in Britain. She achieved international recognition with her first novel Efuru, published in 1966 by Heinemann Educational Books. While never considering herself a feminist, she was best known for recreating life and traditions from an Igbo woman's viewpoint.

#1185

Heather McHugh

#18250

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Heather McHugh is an American poet notable for the independent ranges of her aesthetic as a poet, and for her working devotion to teaching and translating literature. Early life and education McHugh was born in San Diego, California, to Canadian parents. They raised McHugh in Gloucester Point, Virginia. There, her father directed the marine biological laboratory on the York River. She began writing poetry at age five and claims to have become an expert eavesdropper by the age of twelve.

#1186

David Auburn

#11890

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

David Auburn is an American playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. He is best known for his 2000 play Proof, which won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He also wrote the screenplays for the 2005 film version of Proof, The Lake House , The Girl in the Park , and Georgetown .

#1187

Jim Shepard

#22468

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Jim Shepard is an American novelist and short story writer, who teaches creative writing and film at Williams College. Biography Shepard was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He received a B.A. at Trinity College in 1978 and an MFA from Brown University in 1980. He currently teaches creative writing and film at Williams College. His wife, Karen Shepard, is also a novelist. They are on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.

#1188

Lurma Rackley

#15963

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Lurma M. Rackley is an American author, journalist and publicist. The daughter of a civil rights activist, she participated in civil rights demonstrations and was arrested 16 times before she was 13 years old. After college, she became a journalist and later, a publicist with the Washington, D.C. city government. In 1981, Petey Greene asked her to collaborate with him on his autobiography, recording audiotaped interviews with her shortly before his death. Rackley published her book about Greene in 2004.

#1189

Ruth Park

#21553

Overall Influence

1917 - 2010 (93 years)

Rosina Ruth Lucia Park AM was a New Zealand–born Australian author. Her best known works are the novels The Harp in the South and Playing Beatie Bow , and the children's radio serial The Muddle-Headed Wombat , which also spawned a book series .

#1190

Joachim Latacz

#29959

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Joachim Latacz is a German classical philologist. Latacz studied Classical Philology, Indo-Germanic languages, Ancient History and Archaeology from 1954-1956 at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. He then studied Classical Philology, Ancient History and Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin, completing his first degree in 1960. From 1960–1966 was a research associate at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae under Bruno Snell and Hartmut Erbse at the University of Hamburg. He earned his Ph.D. at the Free University of Berlin under Uvo Hölscher in 1963.

#1191

Ben Marcus

#26162

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Ben Marcus is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written four books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader. His latest book, Notes From The Fog: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.

#1192

Takayuki Tatsumi

#24377

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Takayuki Tatsumi is a Japanese scholar. He is a professor at Keio University, where he has taught literary theory and American literature since 1989. As an avid science fiction fan, he authored many books and essays on science fiction. He received Nihon SF Taisho prize in 2000 for Nihon SF ronsōshi.

#1193

Diane Ackerman

#12645

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Diane Ackerman is an American poet, essayist, and naturalist known for her wide-ranging curiosity and poetic explorations of the natural world. Education and career Ackerman received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Pennsylvania State University and a Master of Arts, Master of Fine Arts and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Among the members of her dissertation committee was Carl Sagan, an astronomer and the creator of the Cosmos television series. She has taught at a number of universities, including Columbia and Cornell.

#1194

Femi Osofisan

#12481

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Babafemi Adeyemi Osofisan , known as Femi Osofisan or F.O., is a Nigerian writer noted for his critique of societal problems and his use of African traditional performances and surrealism in some of his plays. A frequent theme that his drama explore is the conflict between good and evil. He is a didactic writer whose works seek to correct his decadent society. He has written poetry under the pseudonym Okinba Launko.

#1195

Haruo Shirane

#34118

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Haruo Shirane is the Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. At Columbia, Shirane is also affiliated with the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He is an expert on Japanese literature, cultural history, and visual culture.

#1196

James Tate

#18688

Overall Influence

1943 - 2015 (72 years)

James Vincent Tate was an American poet. His work earned him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

#1197

Kirsten Boie

#25329

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Kirsten Boie is a German children's author and activist. Having worked as a teacher, she began publishing in 1985 and is the author of more than 100 books. Among her best-known works are Paule ist ein Glücksgriff, the Kinder aus dem Möwenweg series, and Ritter Trenk. She has been recognised with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and an honorary citizenship of Hamburg.

#1198

Katherine Dunn

#18184

Overall Influence

1945 - 2016 (71 years)

Katherine Karen Dunn was an American novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon. She is best known for her novel Geek Love . She was also a prolific writer on boxing.

#1199

Gail Caldwell

#22744

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Gail Caldwell is an American critic and author. She was the chief book critic for The Boston Globe, where she was on staff from 1985 to 2009. Caldwell was the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. The award was for eight Sunday reviews and two other columns written in 2000. According to the Pulitzer Prize board, those columns were noted for “her insightful observations on contemporary life and literature.”

#1200

Peter Kitson

#20864

Overall Influence

Peter J. Kitson is a British academic and author. He is a Professor of Romantic Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia where he teaches and researches the literature and culture of the British Romantic era.

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