Tess Taylor

Tess Taylor is the author of five collections of poetry: Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange (The Museum of Modern Art, 2020); Rift Zone (Red Hen Press, 2020), named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe; Work & Days (Red Hen Press, 2016), which was named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2016 by the New York Times; The Misremembered World (Poetry Society of America, 2013); and The Forage House (Red Hen Press, 2013). 

Taylor edited the anthology Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & The Hands That Tend Them (Storey Publishing, 2023). She is currently at work on two plays, one of which is a stage adaptation of her book of poems about American photographer Dorothea Lange. 

The recipient of fellowships from Amherst College, the American Antiquarian Society, Headlands Center for the Arts, and MacDowell, Taylor also served as the 2010–11 Amy Clampitt Fellow in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Taylor has taught at numerous institutions, from the University of California, Berkeley, to Queen’s University Belfast, where she was Distinguished U.S. Fulbright Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre. She is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and reviews poetry on air for NPR’s All Things Considered. 

She lives in El Cerrito, California, where, in 2024, she was appointed poet laureate. In the same year, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.