About Rae Marie Taylor

Bridging borders, poet and interdisciplinary artist Rae Marie Taylor lives, writes, and performs in the province of Quebec while staying active in her literary community in the American Southwest. A former language and literature teacher at Montreal’s Dawson College, Concordia University’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute, and Quebec’s CEGEP Limoilou, she holds a Master’s degree with honours from L’Université Aix-Marseille, France.

Concerned with the earth and the spiritual health of our contemporary lives, Taylor has authored and produced seven solo bilingual Spoken Word shows with beloved musicians, including Songs of Solidarity/Chants d’amitié en mouvance with Montreal musicians Pierre Tanguay and Diane Labrosse at the opening of her exhibit From Sand and Stars. She often joins fellow artists on stage in various venus and publishes in both English and French in journals such as Montréal Serai, Vallum, KOLA, Les Écrits #146 and the online reviews Mitra and Françoise Stéréo.

Taylor’s voice reaches even further through Zoom with New Mexico’s Fixed & Free publications and San Miguel de Allende PEN Literary celebrations.

Published in Québec but concerned with her homeland, her book of essays, The Land: Our Gift and Wild Hope, was a finalist for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. In 2023, her poetry suite, Steady. Against the Absurd. Kinship at the Core was a Poetry Mesa Chapbook Contest finalist and is now published with Wild Rising Press.

Originally from Colorado and introduced at age ten to New Mexico, Rae Marie Taylor early on cultivated an appreciation for the beauty of the land and cultural diversity of the American Southwest, as well as a sense of shared habitat and kinship with its vegetation and wildlife. Her studies in the French language later led her to finding a vibrant northern community in Quebec where her two worlds joined. It was in Montreal that she founded Quebec’s first courses on Native American literature/First Nations’ Literature at Dawson College and Concordia University’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute.

Rae Marie Taylor has also had a life in the field. At one point, fascinating images occurring in her own painting motivated her to return for several years among her roots. Due to her keen interest in petroglyphs she was soon invited to be a backcountry illustrator for Mesa Verde National Park’s archaeology lab, her most favorite job! The poet also engaged in fieldwork for the former Santa Fe Regional National Park Office and eventually served as conference coordinator and guide in Southwest art and archaeology for Recursos de Santa Fe.