Taylor Byas Books In Order

Publication Order of Poetry Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Taylor Byas is an accomplished author, poet, and essayist.

Dr. Taylor Byas PhD is a Black woman who originally hails from Chicago. She chose to take a break from the city and move to Alabama for six years to live. While there, she was able to get her Bachelor’s degree in English, followed by her Master’s degree in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

She currently resides in Cincinnati. Taylor is an assistant features editor for The Rumpus, an Editorial Board Member for Beloit Poetry Journal, a Poetry Acquisitions Editor for Variant Literature, and a Poetry Instructor for Frontier Poetry’s inaugural Pocket MFA.

Byas has received five Pushcart nominations and six Best of the Net nominations. She has also been the recipient of a Best Microfiction Award. She was the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway Contest and has won many other awards along the way. She won the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets, the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry award, was a finalist for the 2020 Frontier OPEN Prize, and received an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Ninth Letter Literary Award in Poetry.

She has written a chapbook called Bloodwarm that came out in 2021 from Variant Lit. Her second chapbook was titled Shutter and came out in 2022 from Madhouse Press. She also wrote a poetry collection called I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times that came out in 2023.

Taylor is a co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, as well as Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology about Black folklore that is coming out from HarperCollins.

Resting Bitch Face is a collection of poems from Taylor Byas. If you love poetry and want to check out a great new voice in the fiction and poetry world, this is the book for you. It was an Audacious Book Club Pick and is the perfect book to read from start to finish or simply leaf through and read poems as you feel like reading them.

This poetry collection has transformed the Black female speaker from artistic muse, object and victim to the more empowered subject, critic, and master of her story. This is a book that is for anyone. It is for men, for women, for Black women, for those who love art and film criticism, for writers who want to find work that discovers a middle ground between poetry and prose.

Taylor is able to use some of the most frequently ways that we have watched things throughout history such as films, painting, sculpture, and photographs to look more deeply into how these mediums have been able to shape Black female subjectivity.

From looking at art by Gauguin, Picasso, Sally Mann, or Nan Goldin, the author is able to show how she has mastered poetic form by putting forth inventive, intimate writing. She moves between the watcher and the watched as the speaker of the poems uses reflections and mirrors so that they can flip the script and actually talk back to the histories of text, relationships, art, photography, and men.

Whether it’s sculpture, gesso primer, or Polaroids, the author is able to come up with the type of world where the artist is able to call out and the muse is able to respond. She is able to go into the world of the classic artist but also likes to infuse her poems with pop culture works like WandaVision, The Joker, and Last Tango in Paris.

Modern poetry that is inspired is difficult to come by. Taylor Byas has managed to put together a collection of poems that is enlightening and interesting as well as culturally relevant. Check this work out to see what you think of it by getting a copy of Resting Bitch Face today!

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is a 2023 book by Taylor Byas. This book has taken its concept and inspiration from The Wiz, a cult classic film. It follows along with a Black woman as she prepares to depart Chicago’s South Side and become an adult.

The narrative arc of The Wiz involves departing from home as well as different trials that show new things about the self and eventually coming home. It is a loose trajectory for the collection that is able to pull readers through an abandoned barn, a Wendy’s drive-through, Grandma’s house, Sunday service, the corner store and more.

At each stop the speaker has to take on various aspects of her life, such as her sexuality, how visible her body is, who she is as a woman, the alcoholism running in her family, and the different ways that narratives are frequently pushed on her.

Taylor takes big ideas about the South Side and puts the city into a new light, putting it as a living and breathing thing. This book spans sestinas, sonnets, free-verse, erasures and more and imagines once more what the concept of home is. To her, Chicago is not just a city but a teacher, a shadow, and a way that you can see the world. Check out this amazing work from Taylor Byas to follow along with every word.