Alison Taylor-Brown's Biography

Alison Taylor-Brown always writes of characters caught in the rip tides of controversial science and historical upheaval. In her completed novel, a biochemist who creates an artificial organism becomes obsessed with a 16th-century monk turned heretic. Her novel in progress weaves the stories of an ornithologist fighting environmental disaster and a 16th-century free-thinking woman. Past and present blur as the narratives resonate off one another.

Alison directs the Community Writing Program at the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where she is responsible for workshops, critiquing groups, and a regular newspaper column entitled Notes from the Colony.

She learned the magic of words from her grandmother, Beulah Evans, a self-taught lover of literature. Together, they read every book that the Bookmobile delivered over dirt roads to their remote Ozark mountain home.

But Alison chose a practical path, and although her work won awards in the University of Arkansas creative writing program, she received an MBA and spent a decade in accounting and marketing with a national company.

Her first novel was bought by Simon & Schuster and was based on the life of her great-grandfather.

While teaching at various universities, she wrote a second novel about an Atlanta yuppie whose plane crashed in the Ozarks.

While running her own company, which grew exponentially until she sold it, Alison wrote a sci-fi novel about a planet populated by giant brains. She started a Literacy Council and an ESL school, which grew to seventy students.

Alison received her MFA in 2010. She is the director of the annual Ozark Master Class in Fiction. She writes a blog from the 16th century called Wolfgang Capito's View, and a regular newspaper column on writing craft called Notes from the Colony.