Tess Taylor, who Ilya Kaminsky recently hailed as “the poet for our moment” resides in El Cerrito, California. Her poems have received wide national and international acclaim.  Taylor’s chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook competition. The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, (an exploration of hidden family histories through archive and shard) “stunning,” and it was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award.  Taylor’s second book, Work & Days—a farm journal for a small organic farm—was called “our moment’s Georgic” by Harvard based critic Stephanie Burt, and named one of the 10 best books of poetry in 2016 by the New York Times. Taylor’s third book, Last West, is a hybrid photo and poetry book retracing the steps of Dorothea Lange in California. Revisiting the landscapes where Lange photographed (including the site of Migrant Mother) Taylor documents the uneasy, haunting echoes between past and present.  This work appeared as part of the Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures exhibition at MoMA in February 2020. Taylor’s fourth book of poems, Rift Zone, traces literal and metaphoric fault lines—rifts between past and present, childhood and adulthood, what is and what was. Rift Zone was hailed by Stephanie Danler as “brilliant” in the LA Times, and Naomi Shihab Nye called it “stunning” in The New York Times. Rift Zone was also named one of the best books of 2020 by The Boston Globe. Tess was awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Poet Laureate Fellowship in 2024 and served as the Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, California, where she hosted literary events in schools and community centers. During her term as the 2024–25 Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, Tess Taylor brought poetry into classrooms, parks, and public spaces around El Cerrito—curating community voices, amplifying young writers, and nurturing the city’s creative pulse. This fall, she debuts Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, a theatrical adaptation of her 2020 book at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. Against a stunning backdrop of Lange’s  images, Last West traces stories of migration, resilience, and  American paradox. Her forthcoming book COME BITE (Milkweed, 2026), offers intimate poems about the act of attending in a charged and challenging world.

In addition to her life as a poet, Taylor is a nationally known critic. She has spent 10 years as the poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and writes editorials and book reviews for CNN and The New York Times. Taylor’s poems and nonfiction have appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Travel & Leisure, and other publications.  In recent years, Taylor has received fellowships from Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, the MacDowell Colony, the MARBL archive at Emory University, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the International Center for Jefferson Studies. Taylor chaired the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle for 6 years.  Taylor has taught at UC Berkeley, St. Mary’s College and UC Davis, as well as serving as Visiting Professor at Whittier College and Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University in Belfast, where she worked alongside Northern Irish poets Sinead Morrissey, Michael Longley, and Ciaran Carson. She is currently on the faculty of Ashland University’s Low-Res MFA.