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About the Poet

Richard Allen Taylor has authored one poetry chapbook and three full-length collections, all published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. His most recent, Letters to Karen Carpenter and Other Poems (September, 2023) combines poems about the life, death, and career of the famed singer with poems of grief, gratitude, and recovery following the death of Taylor’s wife, who succumbed to leukemia in 2019. Armed and Luminous (2016) grew out of his Queens University of Charlotte MFA thesis and begins with the premise: “If I were in charge of heaven, I’d have an angel for everything, not just for deaths and annunciations.” Punching Through the Egg of Space (2010) is an eclectic mix built loosely around the themes of art, love, new beginnings, and daily living. Something to Read on the Plane (2004), a Main Street Rag chapbook contest finalist, contains many of Taylor’s most memorable humorous poems, including several republished in other journals.

Taylor’s poems, prose, articles, and reviews appear in print and online in Aeolian Harp, Comstock Review, Gyroscope Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, Litmosphere, MacQueen’s Quinterly, moonShine review, Poetry Superhighway, Rattle, Redheaded Stepchild, South Carolina Review, The Pedestal, Wild Goose Poetry Review, YourDailyPoem.com, and more. He co-founded and, for several years, co-edited Kakalak, a poetry and art journal, and served as review editor for The Main Street Rag from 2013 to 2019. In 2015, after retiring from his 44-year business career, Taylor earned his MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte.

Awards and honors Taylor has received include a Pushcart Prize nomination from Running with Water and a Best of the Net nomination from Redheaded Stepchild. He’s won contest prizes from the North Carolina Poetry Society, Poetry Society of South Carolina, Litmosphere, and South Carolina Review, among others, and, in 2016, he and his Kakalak co-editors received the Irene Blair Honeycutt Legacy Award for Service to the Writing Community from Central Piedmont Community College.

A native of Charlotte, Taylor was born into an Army family and spent his first ten years on the move to South Carolina, Georgia, Japan, and back to North Carolina, where his father retired from the military, bought a small farm, and resumed his civilian occupation of schoolteacher. After spending his teenage years as a farm boy in some of the South’s hottest tobacco fields, Taylor had a strong incentive to escape, attend college, and get a desk job. After college, he entered the business world, working in various roles—from manufacturing technician and training specialist, to quality control, production, and human resources managers—and ending up in the city of his birth, Charlotte.

“No matter where I worked or what job I held, everybody I ever worked for, once they found out I could write, wanted me to edit the company newsletter,” Taylor says. He figures at least ten percent of his lifetime earnings can be attributed to writing memos, business reports, policies, procedures, training manuals, and newsletters—“exponentially far, far more money than I will ever make writing poetry.” Like most poets, Taylor writes for love of the art, to indulge his obsessions, and to better understand himself and the world around him. Considering what he’s spent on classes and books, writing events and workshops, he hopes to someday get his cost per poem down to $100 or less.

NOTE: I sign my poetry and other writings with my full legal name, Richard Allen Taylor, to avoid confusion with the distinguished former Poet Laureate of Kentucky, Richard Taylor.