Praise for Facing Toward the East

Facing Toward the East loves you down to people of the South, like Miss Rose and Miss Lurie, and wonders who will come to visit us when we are “facing toward the East.” Carroll Taylor’s poems will wrap you up in a warm quilt, fall you in love with a character on every page.As in “Warp and Weft,” the words “weave the threads of my life….weave the threads tight.”

— Mary Ricketson, author of Hanging Dog Creek, Shade and Shelter,

Mississippi: The Story of Luke and Marian, Lira, Precious the Mule, and

Stutters, A Book of Hope

In Facing Toward the East, the poet takes the reader through an historical journey of memory of family and friends who have gone on to glory. This book is about death, but also about lives lived with challenges and hard work, about disease, and suicide taking the young as well as the old.

In each poem, we meet interesting people, some I felt I had known, because the imagery is so distinct, the senses used in a way that I almost heard Ella’s voice as she sewed the quilt that now lives with her great, great, grandson. This is a poetry book that is also a biographical telling of a time, place and people I want to visit again and again.

— Glenda Council Beall, poet, writer and teacher of memoir

Books Previously Published by Carroll S. Taylor

Chinaberry Summer, New Plains Press 2013

Chinaberry Summer: On the Other Side, New Plains Press 2017

Feannag the Crow, Catch the Spirit of Appalachia, Inc. 2020

Ella’s Quilt, Catch the Spirit of Appalachia, Inc. 2023

Plays Previously Written and Performed

Beneath the Sky and Waters, a One-Act Play co-written by Carroll S. Taylor and Raven Chiong, performed in April 2022

An Appointment with the Year Monger, written by Carroll S. Taylor, performed in February 2024

About the Author

Carroll S. Taylor grew up on a dirt road in rural Georgia. A graduate of Tift College, she is a writer, poet, and playwright. She is the author of two young adult novels, Chinaberry Summer and Chinaberry Summer: On the Other Side as well as two children’s books, Feannag the Crow and Ella’s Quilt. Her poems and stories have appeared in anthologies and online. Her plays have been performed onstage at the Peacock Performing Arts Center in Hayesville, North Carolina.

A retired educator, Taylor is a member of North Carolina Writers’ Network and the Georgia Poetry Society. Snakes, turtles, lizards, and frogs often find their way into her writing. She and her husband Hugh live in Hiawassee, Georgia, where she feeds a visiting crow family whose antics inspire her to write every day.