Tess Taylor

Tess Tylor lives in El Cerrito, California, and has been named “the poet of our moment” by fellow poet Ilya Kaminsky. She’s also a nationally recognized critic, spending more than a decade as the poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered. Tess has authored four books, including her latest poetry book, “Rift Zone,” considered one of the best books of 2020 by The Boston Globe. Her poems and nonfiction work — pertaining to politics, travel, food, and the agrarian lifestyle — have appeared in The New York Times, MSN, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, NPR, The Boston Globe, Travel + Leisure, Harper’s magazine, and Poetry Northwest. She’s 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. As a professor, Tess has taught at institutions like the University of California, Berkeley, St. Mary’s College, and the University of California, Davis. She was also a visiting professor at Whittier College and a Distinguished Fulbright U.S. Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University in Belfast.

• 19+ years of experience as an accomplished poet and critic
• Author of four award-winning of books
• Received a bachelor’s degree in English and urban studies from Amherst College
• Received a master's degree in journalism from New York University