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About the Poet

Richard Allen Taylor has authored one poetry chapbook and four full-length collections, all published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. His most recent, Geography of One (2026), offers poems about the author’s experience of and reflections on living and being alone after the death of his wife. While some of these poems deal with grief and mortality, others traffic in hope and self-discovery, in a compassionate and often humorous way. His previous collection, 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: “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.

Taylor’s awards and honors include, most recently, the 2025 Passionfruit Poetry Award for a single love poem, “On Mother’s Day, Gaby Asks Me What Superpower I Wanted But Didn’t Get,” judged by Amlanjyoti Goswami. Other poems have been recognized by multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations (from Aeolian Harp, Running with Water, Pinesong, Sheila-Na-Gig, Redheaded Stepchild), and awards from the North Carolina Poetry Society, Charlotte Writers Club, the Poetry Society of South Carolina, the Georgia Poetry Society, South Carolina Review, Shakespeare’s Monkey Review, Litmosphere, and Flying South. In 2016, Taylor and his co-editors Lisa Zerkle and Beth Ann Cagle received the Irene Blair Honeycutt Legacy Award from Central Piedmont Community College for their service to the writing community.

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—and ending up in the city of his birth, Charlotte.

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.