Tess Taylor

Tess Taylor is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry. Her chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship, and The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning.” Her second book, Work & Days, was hailed as “our moment’s Georgic” by critic Stephanie Burt and named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by The New York Times. Last West, Taylor’s third book,was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art as part of the Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures exhibition. Her most recent book, Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press, was called “brilliant” by Stephanie Danler in the LA Times and “stunning” by Naomi Shihab Nye in The New York Times. Taylor’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and The New York Times, and she has received fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. She served as Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland and was most recently the Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. Taylor has served as the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. She grew up and lives again in El Cerrito, California.