Raised in rural Alabama, Taylor attended Auburn University Montgomery for his undergraduate studies, and then joined a graduate biochemistry program, and after leaving in 2016 began a career in creative writing. He earned graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow. His short stories and essays have appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, Buzzfeed Reader, , Gay Mag, The New Yorker, The Literary Review, and elsewhere.
''Real Life''
His debut novel, Real Life – "a campus novel imagined from the vantage of a character who is usually shunted to the sidelines ... a gay black student from a small town in Alabama" – was published in 2020 by Riverhead Books, and met with critical acclaim. Describing Taylor's work in the Los Angeles Times, Bethanne Patrick wrote: "His voice might best be described as a controlled roar of rage and pain, its energy held together by the careful thinking of a mind accustomed to good behavior." According to the review of Real Life by Jeremy O. Harris in The New York Times, "It is a curious novel to describe, for much of the plot involves excavating the profound from the mundane. As in the modernist novels of Woolf and Tolstoy cited in passing throughout, the true action of Taylor's novel exists beneath the surface, buried in subterranean spaces." Michael Arceneaux wrote in Time magazine: "Taylor's book isn't about overcoming trauma or the perils of academia or even just the experience of inhabiting a black body in a white space, even as Real Life does cover these subjects. Taylor is also tackling loneliness, desire and — more than anything — finding purpose, meaning and happiness in one's own life ... How fortunate we are for Real Life, another stunning contribution from a community long deserving of the chance to tell its stories." Taylor himself has said: "I hope that it's a novel that challenges people to think about the ways that we fit together in our relationships with one another. I hope it makes people think really deeply about both the ways that they are harmed, and that they do harm to others."
