About
Annie Taylor

I've always been interested in what happens when the story we're living stops making sense.

I've explored that question through fiction, mysteries, travel writing and, more recently, personal essays. I've written about children disappearing into paintings, murder in small Ohio towns, forgotten histories, national parks, strange roadside discoveries and the complicated work of rebuilding a life.

For years, much of my writing happened while traveling. My campervan, Wilbur, carried me across North America through deserts, mountains, coastlines, historic sites and more than a few places that made me pull over because I simply had to know what I was looking at. Those journeys became travel essays and a monthly magazine column—and taught me that curiosity may be the most reliable compass I've ever owned.

Then my attention turned inward.

The Constitutional Case Files grew from a private writing practice in which I began treating the questions of my own life as cases before an imaginary court. Instead of asking only what I felt, I began asking what the evidence showed. What constitutes a boundary? When does grief become instruction? What do we owe the people we love? What do we owe ourselves? When does endurance stop being a virtue?

The resulting essays combine memoir, observation, humor and a slightly ridiculous amount of legal language to examine relationships, identity, loss, independence and the ongoing project of becoming oneself.

Before all of this, I was an educator. I hold a Bachelor of Science in Communication and teaching credentials in English and Speech. I'm also the author of The Coin: Beware the Artist and co-author, with my mother Toni Taylor, of the Farm and Felony mystery series.

I still write fiction. I still travel. I still stop to read the historical marker.

Mostly, I remain interested in the same thing I always have been:

There is a story here. I want to understand it.