Pen Name:
None
Genre:
Poetry, Other Fiction, Other Nonfiction
Websites:
Social Media:
Other Contact:
whitewaterwriting@gmail.com
Bio
I am the author of the new novel, The Shape of What Remains (Liminal Press, 2025), three collections of poetry, most recently Interrogation of Morning (Arlen House/Syracuse University Press, 2022), two chapbooks, and two short fiction collections, most recently Impossibly Small Spaces (Arlen House/Syracuse University Press, 2018). I teach online for writers.com and I am a co-director of the writers conference, Mesa Verde Writers Conference and Literary Festival www.mesaverdewritersconference.org happening this summer July 9-11, 2025 with an all-day literary festival on July 12 with over 50 participating writers from around the country and key note speakers. Registration is currently through the web site. It is in Mancos, Colorado, the gateway to Mesa Verde National Park.
My work is in numerous literary magazines and anthologies and my honors include the Hugo House New Works Fiction Award and Pushcart nominations in fiction and poetry. I love teaching as much as I love writing. My second novel is currently being submitted to agents and literary presses and I’ll be on a national book tour for The Shape of What Remains beginning in April 2025.
New Release
Title: The Shape of What Remains
Publisher: Liminal Books (February 18, 2025)
Genre: Inspirational Spiritual Fiction
Like all trauma, healing happens on its own timetable, often in surprising ways. Paralyzed by grief ten years after witnessing the violent death of her six-year-old daughter, Teresa Calvano turns to Chaucer, Janis Joplin, and a monthly book group to cope.
What did six-year-old Serena Calvano see that caused her to run in the road on a clear November morning while waiting for the school bus with her mother? Teresa Calvano has spent a decade blaming herself for Serena’s violent death and wishing it was her husband, Luke who was with Serena that day so the guilt didn’t fall so heavily on her shoulders. When her husband and friends lose patience with her failure to get back to life, Teresa turns to books, therapy, and Janis Joplin to address her continued unraveling. Is there a cure for grief? In Teresa’s world, her research and life as a successful English professor fail to offer the one thing she most wants: another day with her six-year-old daughter.
Available for Sale
Poetry Collections
Title: Interrogation of Morning
Author: Lisa C. Taylor
Publisher: Arlen House/Syracuse University Press (2022)
Lisa C. Taylor’s new book of poems, Interrogation of Morning, is a stellar marriage of close observation and an energetic imagination. Exploring what she calls, ‘Love’s geometry’, Taylor maps out a territory of beginnings and elegies, of questions and paradoxes. Here is a book to celebrate, wherever you are! (Annie Deppe)
This newest collection by Lisa C. Taylor creates and bravely explores the boundaries between predator and prey, between warning and transformation. Taylor’s poems carve images from a chaotic world, whether in nature closely observed–a snail with feelers out ‘propelled by hunch or hunger’–or in the memories of a devoutly superstitious grandmother. (David Morse)
Taylor’s poems are both introspective and universal. In ‘Yearnings, Covid Times’, she writes, “We wait for a hand to/give the all clear/not prayer or a summoning/more like the gull with a wing trapped/under a piece of driftwood/that we saw freed/by a little girl/in a pink bathing suit.” (Lori Desrosier)
Available for Sale
Syracuse University Press
Amazon
Title: Necessary Silence
Author: Lisa C. Taylor
Publisher: Arlen House/Syracuse University Press (2013)
Through adroit, haunting images, Lisa C. Taylor traces our fraught, and at times dire intersections. At the core of her poetry resides an honesty of awe and a bittersweet awareness of how little we know and how much we care. A poet of both depth and gravity, she never averts her gaze yet her tone remains tender. (Baron Wormser)
Lisa C. Taylor’s poems are marked by their arresting combination of fertile, funky natural imagery with a courageous and searching emotional honesty. As she writes, ‘in the eventual darkness/this will be what matters. (Annie Finch)
Necessary Silence celebrates the body’s glad ability to provide at least ‘temporary shelter’ and the mind’s readiness to ‘blossom like wildflowers. Taylor knows that imagination is the most powerful tool we have for transformation, and in her words, ‘the world is given back to us, radiant. (Ted Deppe)
Available for Sale
Syracuse University Press
Amazon
Short Story Collections
Title: Impossibly Small Spaces
Author: Lisa C. Taylor
Publisher: Arlen House/Syracuse University Press (2018)
Genre: Fiction
The short story dwells within narrow corridors and in ‘Impossibly Small Spaces’, a collection that seamlessly matches form with content, Lisa C. Taylor gifts the reader with cut-glass explorations of the diminishing spaces and of the freedoms–illusory, fleeting, elusive–so craved by a heartbreakingly real cast of characters. Wonderful. (Alan McMonagle)
The stories in ‘Impossibly Small Spaces’ write you into a world that is very much today’s America. Intensely lyrical, it is brimming with characters whose lives are being shaped by the strictures of their own inadequacies. As in her first collection, Lisa C. Taylor tackles such emotive topics as death, adoption, breast cancer, and rape, with subtle intensity, reminiscent of Alice Munro or Amy Bloom. Here are stories where the characters are either physically or emotionally scarred. They don’t know who they are and spend their time trying to prove they exist, often in impossibly small spaces. (Geraldine Mills)
Available for Sale
Syracuse University Press
Amazon
Title: Growing a New Tail
Author: Lisa C. Taylor
Publisher: Arlen House/Syracuse University Press (2016)
Genre: Fiction
“The stories in Growing a New Tail will move you with their honesty and sustain you with their compassionate and fierce commitment to human resilience. Taylor’s characters are as real as your neighbours, as exasperating and complex and present as your family. Their choices are constrained, their failures temporary, and their triumphs provisional as all real victories are. Here is a writer who is nobody’s fool, especially not those who suggest that people are pitiable and renewal impossible. The writing here is exquisite, the observations nearly preternatural, the intelligence incandescent. I am grateful for this book.”—Richard Hoffman, author of Love and Fury
“Growing a New Tail has me growing a new admiration for Lisa C Taylor. If you know her as an accomplished poet, you’ll join me in marvelling at how deftly she hops to prose—even incorporating some braiding of the forms—in this strong collection fittingly about reinvention. If you’ve already been lucky enough to encounter Lisa’s fiction, you’ll celebrate her first book of short stories, populated memorably by characters who must find their footing after their lives have been irreparably altered by loss or circumstance.”—Suzanne Strempek Shea, author of This is Paradise: An Irish Mother’s Grief, an African Village’s Plight and the Medical Clinic That Brought Fresh Hope to Both
Available for Sale
Syracuse University Press
Amazon
Anthology (Contributor)
Title: Dreams for a Broken World
Author: Various
Publisher: Reckoning Press (October 31, 2022)
Genre: Speculative Fiction
Short Story: “Leash Laws” ♦ pp 138-144
Dreams for a Broken World is the second charity anthology in the Dreams series published by Essential Dreams Press, an imprint of Reckoning Press; charity means that all the proceeds from sales are donated to a non-profit doing work to fix our broken world. Ellen Meeropol joins series editor Julie C. Day as guest co-editor of this second book in the series, a fundraiser for the Rosenberg Fund for Children. The RFC is a non-profit, public foundations that aids children in the U.S. whose parents are targeted, progressive activists. They also assist youth who themselves have been targeted as a result of their progressive activities. Can stories change the world? Not alone. But as poet Martín Espada wrote, “Any oppressive social condition, before it can be changed, must be named and condemned in words that persuade by stirring the emotions, awakening the senses.” Naming. Condemning. Stirring. Awakening. That’s what we hope these stories will do for all of us.