About Jo Taylor

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I write intimate, lyrical novels about women whose quiet lives hold extraordinary emotional truths—stories that honor memory, private courage, and the sacredness of ordinary moments.

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While growing up, my family moved when the Army said move, which gave me permission to be obstreperous, and I developed a lifelong habit of finding home in stories when geography kept shifting.

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My mother died when I was two, which gave me something else entirely—a relationship with the unseen that has never quite resolved itself, and probably shouldn't.

 

I spent twenty-five years as an ER nurse, mostly nights, before finishing a degree in English and discovering that I loved to write. I’ve lived aboard a boat in Santa Barbara Harbor, traced my genealogy to the year 310, and married a man whose character I have been stealing for my fiction ever since.

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I currently live in Daphne, Alabama, on the Gulf Coast, where the light is particular and the past is close.

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My poetry and short stories appear in various literary journals. Postcards: Collected Poems and Short Stories was published in 2024. My debut novel, Margaret of Thibodaux, was released in March 2025 and won the IPPY Silver Medal for Regional Fiction. My second novel, Mimi and Maurice—which moves beyond the South to San Francisco, Belgium, and the Belgian Congo—is forthcoming in September 2026. Road Clothes, my third novel, is expected in 2027.

 

I’m also a psychic medium, which is less unusual than it sounds, and more useful to a novelist than you might expect.