Richard Taylor
Taylor in the writing shed of his Franklin County home.
Richard Taylor’s home north of Frankfort, Kentucky, is at once formidable and approachable, packed with all manner of art. “This house was built for leisure,” Taylor says, and it was built in the late 1850s— a time when the human suffering of slave labor made such leisure possible.
“We live in a state whose history is rich and dark,” Taylor says, which makes it excellent fodder for creativity. “I think to some degree being educated about one’s past is being educated about the place in which one lives.”
Taylor was a member of the first generation in his family to grow up some distance away from a rural agrarian life. His father’s ancestors settled in Kentucky before statehood. Taylor grew up in Louisville, but spent a lot of time around farming people, especially on a cousin’s dairy farm in what is now the city’s suburbs.
As a writer, Taylor imagines his way into the lives that have shaped Kentucky’s cultural geography, and his familiarity with small farms and rural landscapes informs his work. He’s written poetry and novels from the perspectives of Abraham Lincoln, John James Audubon, and Marcellus Jerome Clark— also known as Sue Mundy, a Civil War-era Confederate guerilla.
A past Poet Laureate of Kentucky, Taylor teaches writing at Transylvania University. As a teacher, he often draws upon Kentucky literature, in which he finds both “the enduring values that grow out of a kinship with the land,” and a forward-thinking adaptation of those values to the current moment.
Listen to Richard Taylor talk about the importance of writers knowing their agrarian past and adapting it to the needs of the present.
Still life on the sun porch at Taylor’s place.