Grace R. Taylor (They/Them) holds a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Leadership and is currently a Masters’s student at the University of New Brunswick, where they study transgender food poetics. Grace’s academic work focuses largely on queer and trans experiences, mythology, and female sexuality. For the past two years, they have worked with UNB’s graduate journal Qwerty Magazine, first as the Lead Poetry Editor and now as a Co-Managing Editor. Their poetry received the Bliss Carmen Memorial Prize for Poetry in 2020 and their poem “Metamorphosis” was recently featured in The Angle. In the past, Grace has presented their work at the annual conference for the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English in 2022, the Annual Atlantic Undergraduate English Conference at Acadia University in 2020, and the Arts Matters conference at UNB in 2018. Additionally, in 2019 at the Unlock Your Mind Conference hosted by the University of New Brunswick and the Canadian Mental Health Association Grace sat on a panel discussing the heightened effects of mental health and barriers to treatment for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.
In their own words, Grace’s current research and/or interests:
” The body for me has been a site of conflict, masculine vs feminine, victim vs survivor, idyllic vs ill, and so my poetry collection has centred around resolving these conflicts. For me, food has been a language with which I can contextualize my many intersecting identities: queer, trans, sexual assault survivor, disabled. My poetry thesis follows a narrative of coming to consciousness and identity through the lens of food. Broken into three parts, in which the language and ideas evolve and become more complex as the speaker of the poems, I engage with stereotypes of being compared to fruits/vegetables and meat and refute them before capping off the project with my full human thoughts.
Congratulations, Grace!