About Taylor Johnson

2025–2026 Hackerman Writer in Residence

Taylor Johnson photo by S*an D. Henry-Smith

The 2025–2026 Hackerman Writer in Residence is Taylor Johnson. 

Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. He is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a 2024 Whiting Award. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Taylor was the inaugural 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. He is the Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland. With his wife, Elizabeth Bryant, and the poet Simon Shieh, Taylor curates the Green Way Reading Series at People’s Book in Takoma Park.

Learn more at his website: www.taylorjohnsonpoems.com

Q&A with Taylor Johnson

Tell us a bit about yourself and your background as a writer.

I'm a poet inspired to write by the liberatory and communal sounds of go-go music from DC, the self-determining spirit of black art makers across time, and language's "sacred motivation as poetry," as said by Édouard Glissant. I've published one book of poems, Inheritance, and I'm currently working on my second book of poems. I love to follow my curiosities through language, and I look forward to sharing those paths and findings with the community that I'll meet in Baltimore.
 

Why is it important for libraries to have writers working in residence?
 

I think writers are often typified as artists who work in siloed environments, reporting from their isolation and looking down upon the world. However, I find that conversation and exchange with other people is important to my process as a poet. I believe that having a poet working in a library is one way to see in real time the work of what goes into poems, that witnessing that work might inspire others to write or to have a greater connection to the process of the books that the library holds. One reason I'm excited to be in residence at the Enoch Pratt Free Library is to have the opportunity to research the early Maryland archives in the library, and to create poems from that research.
 

What can we expect from your residency?
 

I'm looking forward to holding office hours in the library, exchanging poems with the people who come through, and building relationships with the community that frequents the library branches that I'll get to visit. More than anything, I'm excited to be a poet among people who are interested in writing, to be working on new poems and to share my process of creation with the community in Baltimore.

What's your advice for young aspiring writers?
 

I think young writers would greatly benefit by being in community with writers of all ages. What I loved most about being a poet in DC when I was younger was the opportunity to build community with my peers, and with elders in the city. Additionally, I believe it's important to read widely in order to hear your own voice and to refine your sensibilities based on the language of others, to enter into the great conversation of writers across time. Reading everything inside and outside of my interests has been crucial to my development as a poet.