Born and raised in North Dakota, Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing up Gay in a Fractured Land.
Author Terry Tempest Williams said, “I have been waiting for this book. Boys and Oil is more than a memoir, it is a protest. Taylor Brorby has created a bridge between daydreams and nightmares, the gentle stirrings of the prairie, and the violence of the oil and gas industry. We see through the lens of a gay man, how character and identity are shaped by the landscapes that raise us.”
Brorby has also written Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and is co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, the MacDowell Colony, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Mesa Refuge, Blue Mountain Center, and the North Dakota Humanities Council.
Taylor’s work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Orion Magazine, The Arkansas International, Southern Humanities Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and has appeared in numerous anthologies. He is a contributing editor at North American Review and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press.
Taylor regularly speaks around the country on issues related to extractive economies, queerness, disability, and climate change. He is the Annie Tanner Clark Fellow in Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.
