Taylor Graham has been a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler for more than forty years. She and her husband, Hatch, responded with their trained German Shepherds to hundreds of missions in Alaska, Virginia, California and beyond. They are veterans of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the Loma Prieta earthquake and the Berkeley-Oakland Hills firestorm. While they no longer go on searches, they still train their own dogs and help others in their local training group.

Taylor spent two summers as a Forest Service volunteer ranger in the Mokelumne Wilderness, with her dog, and she’s assisted Hatch - a retired forester-wildlife biologist - in some of his projects, notably the California Bluebird Recovery Program, establishing and monitoring nestbox-trails for cavity nesting birds.

Taylor earned an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California and spent a year in Germany on a Fulbright. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Poetry Now, Rattlesnake Review, Sacramento Voices, Southern Humanities Review, Tule Review and elsewhere. She is included in the anthologies California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University) and Villanelles (Everyman’s Library). Her book, The Downstairs Dance Floor was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.