Tess Taylor is a poet, playwright, and cultural critic who Ilya Kaminsky has hailed as "the poet for our moment." She writes about place, ecology, and cultural reckoning, and her poems have received wide national and international acclaim. She is the author of five poetry collections, including The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, Rift Zone (a 2020 Boston Globe best book), and Work & Days (a 2016 New York Times best poetry book). Her work as a cultural critic appears in Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, CNN, The New York Times, and more. She has taught widely, from UC Berkeley to Queen's University Belfast, and served as on-air poetry reviewer for NPR's All Things Considered for over a decade. She recently published her first full-length poetry anthology, Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis. A staged adaptation of Last West will run at Marin Theatre Company in 2027. Her next book, Come Bite, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2027. She lives and gardens just outside Berkeley, California.

  • In addition to her life as a poet, Tess 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, Tess 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. Tess chaired the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle for 6 years.

  • Tess 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.