Taylor Lewis
About
Taylor A. Lewis is a teacher, writer, and editor based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has a BA in English from Spelman College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Camden, where he also taught composition and creative writing courses. He has worked as a poetry editor for The Auburn Avenue, an Atlanta-based publication for people of color, and as a teaching artist for Growing Great Writers, a program that offers creative writing workshops for students in Camden County. He is also a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry and the project manager for the Poets and Scholars Summer Writing Retreat, a free retreat and writers' conference sponsored by Rutgers University's Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice. He is currently a high school teacher at Belmont Charter Network, where he teaches English and literature. Taylor is passionate about arts and culture, civil rights and social action, economic empowerment, and human rights. He has published several poems and reviews in various journals and magazines.
Publications & Speaking Engagements
Publications:
Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:
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Lambda Literary Fellows Reading
Organizations/Accomplishments/Upcoming Projects
Previous Organizations
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Belmont Charter Network
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Bryan Mawr College
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UMass Global
Accomplishments
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Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry
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Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Queer Writer Fellowship in Prose
How Do Social and Racial Justice Concerns Appear in Your Work?
My poetry is focused on the political act of personal storytelling as a means of recording individual experience within a complex system of intersecting oppressions.
ISGRJ Project: Quilting Water Public Arts Project
A Directors' Signature Research Project: Institute Codirector Patrick Rosal, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University–Camden
Quilting Water is a five-year international public art initiative. In its local form, the project explores the relationship residents of Camden, New Jersey, have to the increasingly vulnerable public resource of water. A community of Black quilters from Camden will be commissioned to make quilts in conversation with photos and oral histories from their own city. The institute will publish a book of the photos, excerpts of the interviews, and images of the quilts, as well as text about water and the intersections of race and environmental justice.