Tess Taylor is the author of five celebrated poetry collections including The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, and Rift Zone (named a 2020 Boston Globe best book), and Work & Days (a 2016 NY 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 in 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 her book of poems about Dorothea Lange will launch at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in 2025. Her next book, Come Bite, will be published in 2026. She lives and gardens just outside Berkeley, California.

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. Read about the Poet Laureate Project here.

  • 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.