M. Jane Taylor

About the Artist

M. Jane Taylor earned a Master of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University and was honored with the program’s Outstanding Graduate Award for fiction, and she is a recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council's Regional Independent Artist Award and MSAC Grants for Artists Award. She lives in Baltimore with her wife, Autumn, and their children, Angus and Maeve.

Artist's Statement

My in-progress linked stories chronicle a clan of Blue Ridge mountaineers across generations from the hills to the lowlands, inspired by my own family saga. The early-to-mid-1900s saw a mass outmigration of Southern Appalachians to seek jobs and other opportunities in the industrial cities of the North and elsewhere, and my mother and father as children were swept up into the exodus out of the Blue Ridge, along with droves of poor hills farmers and sharecroppers who journeyed from Virginia and West Virginia to forge new communities in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. One of my aims as a writer is to give voice to characters who may not have much voice or agency in the literary world or the world at large, despite the contemporary writing advice to dampen and dilute regional dialects and vernacular. Above all, I hope that my stories entertain and that they spur readers to think, feel, imagine, and perchance fall in love with characters and lives outside of their own experiences.