Virtual Craft Chat with Poet Taylor Byas

Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by Taylor Byas to discuss her debut collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. Taylor is in conversation with Emily Holland, poet and editor of Poet Lore.

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Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. (she/her) is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus and a Poetry Acquisitions Editor for Variant Literature. She is the author of the chapbook Bloodwarm from Variant Literature, a second chapbook, Shutter, from Madhouse Press, and her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in August of 2023. She is also a co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, forthcoming from Texas Review Press, and of Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology on Black folklore from HarperCollins. She is represented by Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency.

About the Book
Inspired by The Wiz, this debut, full-length poetry collection celebrates South Side Chicago and a Black woman’s quest for self-discovery—one that pulls her away from the safety of home and into her power.

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times takes its inspiration and concept from the cult classic film The Wiz to explore a Black woman’s journey out of the South Side of Chicago and into adulthood. The narrative arc of The Wiz—a tumultuous departure from home, trials designed to reveal new things about the self, and the eventual return home—serves as a loose trajectory for this collection, pulling readers through an abandoned barn, a Wendy’s drive-thru, a Beyoncé video, Grandma’s house, Sunday service, and the corner store. At every stop, the speaker is made to confront her womanhood, her sexuality, the visibility of her body, alcoholism in her family, and various ways in which narratives are imposed on her.

Subverting monolithic ideas about the South Side of Chicago, and re-casting the city as a living, breathing entity, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times spans sestinas, sonnets, free-verse, and erasures, all to reimagine the concept of home. Chicago isn’t just a city, but a teacher, a lingering shadow, a way of seeing the world.