Brandon Taylor will be coming to Columbia next April!

We’re very excited to welcome Brandon Taylor to Unbound 2020! Brandon’s debut novel, Real Life, will be published in February 2020, and we predict great things for it. (And hey, Columbia: it’s set in a Midwestern university town.) It’s a gut punch of a novel, a story that asks if it's ever really possible to overcome our private wounds and buried histories—and at what cost.

But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s fellow Unbound 2020 guest, Garth Greenwell: “Real Life reveals the knives we pocket in good intentions, our constant, communal sabotage of love. Brandon Taylor’s genius lies in the elaboration of ever more revelatory gradations of feeling; in his extraordinary debut he invents new tools for navigating the human dark in which we know one another. He is a brilliant writer, and this is a beautiful book.”

Photo credit: Bill Adams

Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Literary Hub. His writing has earned him fellowships from Lambda Literary Foundation, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.