Richard Allen Taylor is the author of 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 (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 that “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 of poems built loosely around themes of art, love, new beginnings, and daily living. Something to Read on the Plane (2004) was selected as a finalist in a Main Street Rag chapbook contest and contains many of Taylor’s most memorable humorous poems, including several that have been republished multiple times in various magazines and anthologies.
Taylor’s poems, articles and reviews have appeared in many online and print publications including Rattle, Comstock Review, The Pedestal, Iodine Poetry Journal, Wild Goose Poetry Review, YourDailyPoem.com, Litmosphere, Gyroscope Review, Red Headed Stepchild, South Carolina Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Poetry Superhighway, Aolian Harp and others. Taylor co-founded, and for several years co-edited, Kakalak, a poetry and art journal, and served as Review Editor for The Main Street Rag (2013 – 2019). After retiring from his forty-four-year business career, Taylor earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte in 2015.
Taylor’s work has been recognized with awards and honors from many sources including a Pushcart Prize Nomination from Running with Water and a Best of the Net Nomination from Red Headed Stepchild; various prizes from North Carolina Poetry Society, the Poetry Society of South Carolina, Litmosphere, and South Carolina Review, among others. In 2016, he and his Kakalak co-editors received the Irene Honeycutt Legacy Award for Service to the Writing Community from Central Piedmont Community College.
A native of Charlotte, North Carolina, Taylor was born into an Army family and spent the first ten years of his life 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 hottest tobacco fields in the South, Taylor developed a strong aversion to manual labor and couldn’t wait to get to college and away from the farm. After college, he entered the business world and worked in various roles such as manufacturing technician, training specialist, quality control, production manager and human resources manager, ending up in the city of his birth, Charlotte. “But 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 figures that at least ten percent of his lifetime earnings could 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,” he added. 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 has spent on classes, books, travel to writers’ events and other expenses, he’s hoping to someday get his cost per poem down to $100 or less.
*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.
