Taylor, Kim

Personal

Born in Denver, CO. Education: University of California, Irvine, B.A. (drama); California State University, Los Angeles, M.A. (special education).

Addresses

Home and office—Salinas, CA. E-mail—kimtaylor@kimtaylor.net.

Career

Educator and author. Heald College, Salinas, CA, instructor; RISE (nonprofit job-training program), lead faculty. Singular Productions, Los Angeles, CA, former actor and founding member.

Awards, Honors

Willa Literary Award for Best Young Adult Novel, Women Writing the West, 2002, for Cissy Funk.

Writings

Cissy Funk (young-adult fiction), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2001.

Bowery Girl (young-adult novel), Viking (New York, NY), 2006.

Also author of two-act play Not So Quiet, adapted from the novel by Helen Zenna Smith.

Sidelights

In addition to teaching at the college level, Kim Taylor is the author of several young-adult novels, as well as a stage adaptation of Helen Zenna Smith's World War I novel Not So Quiet. Cissy Funk, which earned Taylor the 2002 Willa Cather Award from Women Writing the West, is set in Colorado during the depression years of the 1930s, and follows a fourteen-year-old girl as she copes with an abusive mother, a runaway father, and the loving aunt who attempts to rescue her. Taylor's second novel, Bowery Girl, was inspired by the author's love of history and her reading of Jacob Riis's famous 1890 social documentary history How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York.

Set in the late nineteenth century, Bowery Girl shows teen readers that the modern realities of city life—gang violence, crime, unplanned pregnancy, and poverty—are nothing new: they were shared by teens of previous generations. In the novel, street-smart, sixteen-year-old Mollie Flynn relies on her wits and thieving ways to survive in nineteenth-century Manhattan. Dreaming of the better life that could be hers across the newly erected Brooklyn Bridge, Molly and her roommate Annabelle decide to save up enough money to make this shared dream a reality. However, Annabelle works as a prostitute, and when she winds up pregnant the dream is threatened. Hoping to find a way to keep their plan alive, the teens enroll in a series of self-improvement classes, despite the pressure of those around them to accept their station as Bowery dwellers. In Kliatt, Janis Flint-Ferguson called Bowery Girl "a gritty, realistic look" at life in the nineteenth century, while Jennifer Mattson commented in Booklist that the author "allows her characters to behave mostly unhampered" by any overarching message. In Voice of Youth Advocates, Mary E. Heslin called Taylor's young characters "complex" and concluded that Bowery Girl "is not just fine historical fiction; it is also splendid writing with mega teen appeal."

For Taylor, the research she did while writing Bowery Girl was one of the most compelling parts of the writing process. As she noted on her home page: "To research 1883 Manhattan is to conjure ghosts, to dig through contemporary and historical accounts that sometimes glorify and exaggerate both rich and poor, both goodness and evil. The specifics in research, be-

yond dates and places and streets, came from studying the photographs of the time. To look for the dimness of the gaslights, the children playing in a street and blithely unaware of the dead horse laying ten feet away, the thick layer of grease on a tenement wall, a momentary smile. To walk, for a moment, with two young women who wanted only a bit of sunshine and a chance for something better."

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Booklist, August, 2001, Frances Bradburn, review of Cissy Funk, p. 2109; March 1, 2006, Jennifer Mattson, review of Bowery Girl, p. 83.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, May, 2001, review of Cissy Funk, p. 354; May, 2006, Elizabeth Bush, review of Bowery Girl, p. 425.

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, October, 2006, Judith A. Hayn, review of Bowery Girl, p. 159.

Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2006, review of Bowery Girl, p. 358.

Kliatt, March, 2006, Janis Flint-Ferguson, review of Bowery Girl, p. 17.

Publishers Weekly, May 28, 2001, review of Cissy Funk, p. 89.

School Library Journal, May, 2001, Cindy Darling Codell, review of Cissy Funk, p. 160; March, 2006, Kelly Czarnecki, review of Bowery Girl, p. 230.

Voice of Youth Advocates, August, 2001, review of Cissy Funk, p. 207; April, 2006, Mary E. Heslin, review of Bowery Girl, p. 52.

ONLINE

Kim Taylor Home Page,http://www.kimtaylor.net (May 16, 2007).