John Taylor, born in Des Moines in 1952, has lived in France since 1977. He is the author of several volumes of short prose and poetry, most recently The Dark Brightness (Xenos Books, 2017), Grassy Stairways (The MadHat Press, 2017), Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2018), and a "double book" coauthored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges (The Fortnightly Review Press, 2019). As a polyglot literary critic and translator from French, Italian, and Modern Greek, Taylor has long been a bridge between European literature and English-speaking countries. His translation of Elias Papadimitrakopoulos's stories, Toothpaste with Chlorophyll & Maritime Hots Baths, originally published by Asylum Arts in 1992, was republished in 2020 by Coyote Arts.
