Taylor Byas.

We are proud to partner with the Maya Angelou Book Award to bring the winner of the award to Unbound each year as part of their tour of colleges, universities, and libraries. This year’s winner is the poet Taylor Byas, who will speaking on two panels as well as performing a reading of her work.

Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the author of the chapbook Bloodwarm from Variant Lit, a second chapbook, Shutter, from Madhouse Press, her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times  from Soft Skull Press, which won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award and the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and her second full-length Resting Bitch Face, forthcoming in 2025. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, published with Texas Review Press in December 2023, and Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology forthcoming from HarperCollins.