Sam Taylor

Sam Taylor is the author of three books of poems, Body of the World (Ausable/Copper Canyon), Nude Descending an Empire (Pitt Poetry Series), and The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse (Negative Capability Press). His poems—ranging in theme from mysticism to social justice, and from the ecological to the erotic—have appeared in such publications as The Kenyon Review, AGNI, and The New Republic. For several years, he lived as a wilderness caretaker in the San Juan Mountains of northern New Mexico, spending much of the winters snowed in without electricity, phone, or internet. He has traveled around the world with the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, and his work has been recognized with the Dobie Paisano Fellowship and residency awards from Yaddo, Ucross, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. A native of Miami, he currently tends a garden in Kansas, where he is an associate professor and directs the MFA program at Wichita State University.