A widely published critic, poet and essayist, and on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered,  Tess Taylor’s five books of poems blend the lyric and the reportorial in unexpected ways, leading to what Nate Dixon of the Georgia Review recently hailed as “rich investigative poetry.”  In 2020 she published two collections:  
Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, part of the Dorothea  Lange: Words and Pictures exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, and Rift Zone, which reads California’s history against sites of social, historic, and personal rupture.  In the Los Angeles Times, Stephanie Danler hailed Rift Zone as “brilliant,” and EcoTheo Review, Hannah Vanderhart wrote “Taylor’s poetry reveals not so much a blending of the environmental and the social, but that the two are inseparable and in direct relationship with one another.”  Jason Myers named Rift Zone one of the best books of 2020 in the Boston Globe.  She is currently editing an anthology of new gardening poems and working to restore a community orchard in Berkeley, California. www.tess-taylor.com.