Jo Taylor writes intimate, lyrical novels about women whose quiet lives hold extraordinary emotional truths. Her stories are grounded in the particular light of the Gulf Coast and the long memory of the American South—and in a deep tenderness for what ordinary moments carry.

She spent twenty-five years as an ER nurse—night shifts, mostly—before finishing a degree in English and discovering, somewhat to her own surprise, that she loved to write. She has lived aboard a boat, traced her genealogy to the year 310, and married a man whose character she has been stealing for her fiction ever since.

Her short fiction and poetry have been published in After the Pause, Front Porch Review, and Right Hand Pointing, among others; "Path Before Giants" was nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. Postcards: Collected Poems and Short Stories was published in 2024. Her debut novel, Margaret of Thibodaux, was released in March 2025. Her second novel, Mimi and Maurice, is forthcoming in September 2026. Road Clothes, her third novel, is expected in 2027 from Road Clothes Press, the literary imprint she founded to publish her own work.