Late Night Conversation, hosted by Kristin Maffei

Featured Guest: Tess Taylor

Purchase Work & Days and The Forage House
Tonight, Kristin speaks with Tess Taylor, author of Work & Days, about poetry, food, the natural world, and classical inspirations. In 2010, Taylor was awarded the Amy Clampitt Fellowship. Her prize: A rent-free year in a cottage in the Berkshires, where she could finish a first book. But Taylor—outside the city for the first time in nearly a decade, and trying to conceive her first child—found herself alone. To break up her days, she began to intern on a small farm, planting leeks, turning compost, and weeding kale. In this calendric cycle of 28 poems, Taylor describes the work of this year, considering what attending to vegetables on a small field might achieve now.
And, if you’d like to learn more about Taylor, check out her interview with Rookie Report about The Forage House from three years ago.
ABOUT OUR FEATURED GUEST:

Tess Taylor grew up in Berkeley, California, where she led youth garden programming at the Berkeley Youth Alternatives Community Garden and interned in the kitchen at Chez Panisse. In her twenties, she dropped out of Amherst College to become a translator and chef’s assistant at L’Ecole Ritz Escoffier in Paris. An avid gardener and cook, she is also an acclaimed poet. Her chapbook The Misremembered World was selected by Eavan Boland and published by the Poetry Society of America. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker. The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning” and it was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. Tess is currently the on air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and was most recently visiting professor of English and creative writing at Whittier College.
Podcast correction: It was misstated in this podcast where Alice Quinn was when she published Amy Clampitt. She was at Knopf at that time, and is now at Poetry Society of America.