Born on June 21, 1942, Henry Taylor's collections of poetry include Understanding Fiction: Poems 1986-1996 (Louisiana State University Press, 1996); The Flying Change (1985), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize; An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards (1975), and The Horse Show at Midnight (1966). He was born in Virginia, and attended the University of Virginia where he was active in the drama club, and was also a talented equestrian.

Taylor is the recipient of the Witter Bynner Foundation Poetry Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Golden Crane Award of the Washington Chapter of the American Literary Translators Association, and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He has also translated several works from Bulgarian, French, Hebrew, Italian, and Russian, including Black Book of the Endangered Species (1999) by the Bulgarian poet Vladimir Levchev. He lives in Leesburg, Virginia, and is a professor of literature and co-director of the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, D.C. From https://poets.org