Sheila Ortiz Taylor

Assisted Living
Violet March, an eighty-two year old resident of Casa de los Sueños, finally has the opportunity to put years of mystery reading to practical use. One by one her comrades, the Bingos, are dying. Is this natural attrition, or is there a plot afoot?

At night, walking unsteadily behind her trusty purple walker, she explores the corridors, while behind doors left ajar the uneasy residents of assisted living do Kegal exercises, compose operas, climb mountains, re-live trips to Cozumel, and ask intriguing questions about the nature of aging and of death.

OutRageous
"Faultline, published a quarter century ago, was a laugh-out-loud novel about a dyke with six children, her custody battle for those kids, and three hundred rabbits. Skip ahead a few years to OutRageous, also set in the ‘70ies, and motorcycle-riding Latina poet Arden Benbow is relocating her kids and her partner (but not the rabbits) to Florida, where a small liberal arts college with a very conservative administration has hired her as a token twofer: she’s both a woman and an ethnic." San Francisco Bay Times

Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady
I edited this compelling classic as a work of love. The original is the longest novel in the English language. I retained Richardson's language while trimming out some of the subplots and moralizing. I hope I have preserved the essence of this novel, its unforgettable art, while making it more accessible to the modern reader.

Coachella
"Sheila Ortiz Taylor straddles fault lines, patiently excavates the genealogies of vastly different worlds and communities in collision, mining them for their precious nuggets of shared humanity. All this with wit and corazón."

Imaginary Parents
"While Sheila Ortiz Taylor's title foregrounds the imaginary, seldom has a writer so convincingly transported me into the space of childhood wonder and simultaneously made present the concrete objects that made up and filled that space--especially the intense sensibility of human bodies as signs of quiet but eloquent, and sometimes troubled, spirits. A marvelous, unforgettable read." Juan Bruce-Novoa.

Faultline
"Faultline is a family narrative done to a brilliant surreal turn. An American standup comic masterpiece sired by Buster Keaton out of Gertrude Stein, born on the San Andreas fault and danced on the ceiling by a Black Fred Astaire."

Spring Forward/Fall Back
"Always at a party Elizabeth would feel that there was somewhere else in the house she would rather be, with people other than her date, that there was a life going on underneath the one everybody thought was the only real life, and that this underground life offered a freedom, a richness, that the other lacked. But how could she know what it offered when she had never received an invitation, had no assurances that it even existed outside her own ravenous imagination?"

Southbound.
This novel is the sequel to FAULTLINE, the second in the Arden Benbow trilogy. Though out of print, you can find a signed collector's copy from Amazon by clicking on the link.

Slow Dancing At Miss Polly's
This is my only volume of poetry so far, unless you consider "Imaginary Parents" poetry, which it may well be. This collection includes "How to Please Your Mother," "The Way Back," "Dyke Patrol," and others. Naiad published the book in 1989, but autographed copies are available in the used book section of Amazon.