Taylor's short stories and essays have appeared in
Granta,
Guernica,
American Short Fiction,
Gulf Coast,
Buzzfeed Reader,
O: The Oprah Magazine,
Gay,
The New Yorker,
The Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is the senior editor of
Electric Literatures "Recommended Reading" and is a staff writer at
Literary Hub. having reviewed works by authors such as
Sally Rooney,
Emma Cline, and
Banana Yoshimoto. He also wrote the introduction for "Wading in Waist-High Water", a commentary book about the lyrics of
Fleet Foxes. In an interview for the Booker Prizes, Taylor said his influences were
Mavis Gallant,
André Aciman,
Jane Austen,
Alice Munro,
Louise Glück,
Elizabeth Bishop,
Hilton Als,
Pat Conroy and
Ann Petry. He received a fellowship from the
Lambda Literary Foundation in 2017. He has also received fellowships for his writing from Kimbilio Fiction and the
Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop. His debut novel,
Real Life, was published in 2020 with
Riverhead Books. In 2021, a collection of his stories,
Filthy Animals, was also published by Riverhead.
Real Life Taylor wrote his debut novel,
Real Life, in less than five weeks, and he later explained his approach: "I was like, I'm going to sit down and knock this out so I can get on with my life.... Writing a novel ruins your life in really specific ways. Because you have to live inside of it. It's just this sustained exercise in being miserable." It is "a campus novel imagined from the vantage of a character who is usually shunted to the sidelines ... a gay black student from a small town in Alabama". Published in 2020 by
Riverhead Books,
Real Life received critical acclaim. Describing Taylor's work in the
Los Angeles Times, Bethanne Patrick wrote: "His voice might best be described as a controlled roar of rage and pain, its energy held together by the careful thinking of a mind accustomed to good behavior." According to the review of
Real Life by
Jeremy O. Harris in
The New York Times, "It is a curious novel to describe, for much of the plot involves excavating the profound from the mundane. As in the modernist novels of Woolf and
Tolstoy cited in passing throughout, the true action of Taylor's novel exists beneath the surface, buried in subterranean spaces."
Michael Arceneaux wrote in
Time: "Taylor's book isn't about overcoming trauma or the perils of academia or even just the experience of inhabiting a black body in a white space, even as
Real Life does cover these subjects. Taylor is also tackling loneliness, desire and — more than anything — finding purpose, meaning and happiness in one's own life... How fortunate we are for
Real Life, another stunning contribution from a community long deserving of the chance to tell its stories." Taylor himself has said: "I hope that it's a novel that challenges people to think about the ways that we fit together in our relationships with one another. I hope it makes people think really deeply about both the ways that they are harmed, and that they do harm to others." Taylor's book tour to publicize his novel was cut short by the
COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions on travel and public gatherings.
Real Life was shortlisted for the 2020
Booker Prize.
The New York Times included the novel on its list of "100 Notable Books of 2020". In 2021,
GQ reported that
Real Life was being adapted into a movie featuring
Kid Cudi. In the
Los Angeles Review of Books, Thomas Mar Wee wrote in praise of the book: "Neither cold nor detached, these stories are suffused with a warmth and humanity that recalled for me the uncanniness of
Raymond Carver, the empathy of
Alice Munro, and the meticulous irony of
Chekhov."
The Late Americans Taylor's second novel,
The Late Americans, was published in 2023. It follows a group of writers in
Iowa City, where he lived while getting an MFA at the
Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Minor Black Figures In March 2025, Taylor announced the upcoming release of his third novel,
Minor Black Figures, on his
Substack newsletter
Sweater Weather. The novel revolves around a gay Black painter as he navigates his artistic ambitions in
New York City and becomes involved with a former
Jesuit priest. In the same announcement, Taylor mentioned that he had abandoned the novel
Group Show, after having struggled to finish it since 2018.
Other projects A June 2023 article published in
The Guardian reported that Taylor was working on novels entitled
Group Show and
Other Years, as well as a
Southern Gothic project called
Kinfolks. He stated in the article that he had found the process of writing
Kinfolks particularly daunting, as it represented his first fictional foray into the rural environments of his youth. On July 10, 2024,
Publishers Weekly reported that Taylor is slated to publish two
non-fiction books through
Graywolf Press: one, a collection of
literary criticism, due in fall 2026; the other, a book on the craft of writing, due in fall 2027. On the same day,
Publishers Weekly also reported that
Unnamed Press, an
independent publisher for which Taylor serves as an acquiring editor, had formed the imprint Smith & Taylor Classics, which will be dedicated to publishing lesser-known works by acclaimed authors. Taylor and fellow Unnamed Press editor Allison Miriam Woodnutt (
née Smith) are the imprint's
namesakes. == Personal life ==