Originally from Des Moines, John Taylor left the United States in 1975, studied in Germany, spent a year in Greece, then settled in France, where he still lives. His stories, short prose, and poems have been translated into French, Greek, Italian, Slovene, Polish, Ukrainian, and Dutch. As a critic specialized in contemporary European literature, he is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, the Antioch Review (in which he writes the Poetry Today column), the Michigan Quarterly Review, and other periodicals. A generous selection of his essays was published by Transaction in 2004 as Paths to Contemporary French Literature, followed by a second volume in 2007 and a third volume in 2011. Another collection of essays, Into the Heart of European Poetry (Transaction), appeared in 2008. For his translations of French and Modern Greek authors, he has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sonia Raiziss Giop Charitable Foundation. The Bitter Oleander Press has recently published, in a single volume, Taylor's translations of three books of poetry by Jacques Dupin, OF FLIES AND MONKEYS (including Mothers and Hazel Tree).
