Living with his wife and young children in a small apartment during the pandemic lockdown, Rob Taylor developed a habit of retreating to the wooded fringes of a nearby walking trail with a camping chair to do his work. “I needed that space in order to edit the writing of others,” writes Taylor, “but when time allowed I waited in that quiet, that wind and birdsong, for haiku.” A companion to his poetry collection The News, Taylor’s Weather was written over the first three years of his daughter’s life, chronicling the accumulative effect of intimacy and contemplation and revelling in the “small moments out of which we assemble our lives.”

Rob Taylor was born and raised in Port Moody, BC, and lives in Vancouver with his wife and son. He is the author of two books of poetry: The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011). In 2017, The News was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and in 2010 the manuscript for The Other Side of Ourselves won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. He was the poetry editor at PRISM international in 2014–15. Rob has run a blog devoted to Canadian poetry, Roll of Nickels, since 2006. In 2015 he received the City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for the Literary Arts as an emerging artist. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of the Fraser Valley.

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