Discipline: Literature – nonfiction

Taylor Brorby

Discipline: Literature – nonfiction
Region: Geneva, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2018

Taylor Brorby completed a draft of his memoir, titled Boys and Oil: Growing up Gay in a Fractured Land (Liverlight), as well as drafts of essays about extractive economies in North Dakota and West Virginia. An award-winning essayist, and poet, Taylor has received fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, Black Earth Institute, Bread Loaf, and the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. He has held residences at Mesa Refuge and Blue Mountain Center. His books include Crude: Poems and Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and he is the co-editor of the country’s first anthology of creative writing on hydraulic fracking, Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. Taylor’s work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Orion, North American Review, High Country News, among others. Taylor regularly travels around the country to speak about the Bakken oil boom in western North Dakota and climate change. He is reviews editor at Orion Magazine and contributing editor for North American Review and teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Studios

MacDowell

Taylor Brorby worked in the MacDowell studio.

Built in 1912, Pine Studio was renamed MacDowell Studio in 1943 in recognition of support from a group of Edward MacDowell’s music students. It was built as a composers’ studio and the stuccoed walls were intended to be soundproof. Like many of the studios on property, MacDowell was winterized in the 1950s when the program began welcoming…

Learn more