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In Conversation: Taylor Byas & jason b. crawford
September 16, 2025 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT
We welcome Taylor Byas & jason b. crawford to The Notebooks Collective in September. We are thrilled to have these two brilliant poets join us to talk about craft, friendship, using poetry as a means to reckon with oppression and more.
When asked why they want to be in conversation, they said:
Sometimes your writing friends and your “real-life” friends are two separate groups, but with us, we know each other deeply both on and off the page. Our friendship has spanned multiple years, and throughout that time, we have been privy to the evolutions of each other’s creative projects, often playing a huge editorial role in those projects’ developments. In our new projects, we both attempt to re-narrativize our existence and write an alternative Black subjectivity that has more agency than our current lived realities. One of us writes across time, imagining a future world that is safe for Black queer bodies. One of us looks squarely into the faces of past artists and this current socio political environment in which women are constantly surveilled from all angles. But both of us are equally concerned with using poetry as a means to reckon with oppression, reimagine life’s possibilities, and access joy in a landscape that aims to produce only grief and misery.
Taylor Byas
Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. (she/her) is a Black Chicago native who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is a Features Editor for The Rumpus, an Editorial Board Member for Beloit Poetry Journal, and an Editorial Advisor for Jackleg Press. She is the author of two chapbooks, her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, from Soft Skull Press, which won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and the 2024 Ohio Book Award for Poetry, and Resting Bitch Face, forthcoming in August 2025. She is also a co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama from Texas Review Press, and of Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology on Black folklore from HarperCollins.
jason b. crawford
jason b. crawford (They/He) born in Washington DC and raised in Lansing, MI, is the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Their second collection, YEET! is the winner of the Omnidawn 12st/2nd Book Prize and will be published Fall 2025. They have been published in POETRY Magazine, Academy of American Poets, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO Poetry, among others. The are a 2023 Emerging Writers Fellow for Lambda Literary and hold their MFA in Poetry from The New School.