Taylor Rose

Taylor is an award-winning journalist who has written about tech, art, sustainability, and human rights for over 10 years. Taylor has also worked in the tech sector and for nonprofits as a content strategist throughout their career.

Today, Taylor is a futurist who writes about the social and ecological impact of commodified technology. They do so through speculative nonfiction and sci-fi. Taylor is interested in using decolonized research methodologies to document scenes from a potential future. 

They hold a BA in Journalism from Indiana University, an MA in Urban Sustainability, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Antioch University. Taylor has published one book, written a second, and is currently writing a third. 

Below is a mix of Taylor's marketing copywriting, editing, academic, and journalism portfolios.

They specialize in writing about complex topics in a way that anyone can understand.  

TLDR: 

• 10+ years of content experience
• 5 years of journalism experience
• 5 years of tech experience
• Content strategy & PR consultant
• 1 book published, 2 manuscripts completed

Taylor has written over 2,000 articles — and edited at least three times that — throughout their journalism career. As a content marketer, Taylor has developed and executed hundreds of blogs, case studies, ebooks, newsletters, reports, and infographs.  These are just a few of their favorites, along with some of Taylor's author pages. 

A video recording of Taylor's MFA graduate lecture that makes a case for speculative nonfiction to become the genre of choice for those who write about imagining alternative futures and social change. 

This is a selection from my manuscript Empire of Insight, which is currently in the proposal stage to publishers and agents. 

...and how it led to writing about tech and climate change 

Taylor is an award-winning journalist who has written about sustainability, tech, art, and human rights for the last decade. They have written for NUVO alternative weekly, Indianapolis Monthly Magazine, Pattern Magazine, The Indy Star, and published their first book, Crashing Through The Front Door. 

In 2019, when Taylor released Crashing Through The Front Door  they found themselves at a crossroads. They had come out as transgender two years before, and after writing a book about LGBTQ culture, they felt increasing pressure to only write queer stories. Internally, they were still sorting out many aspects of their own queer identity that were tied to gender.

Taylor shifted their full time work to tech marketing where they honed their skills to create digital campaigns, customer journeys, and content that moves people to action. It was while working in tech marketing that Taylor began to understand the power of the surveillance economy. Their work in tech marketing taught them how to monitor a consumer’s behavior and track their digital footprint.

Learning how these small aspects of the surveillance economy worked was unsettling for Taylor. They wanted to move away from marketing and focus on a passion that has been passed down in their family — studying the environment. Taylor’s grandfather and grandmother were biologists, their mother is a naturalist and migration tracker, and their father is a social scientist. Caring for the natural world is an important part of Taylor’s identity.

They decided to shift their writing to environmentalism, and wanted to do so in the context of living in an urban area. Taylor then received two graduate degrees, one in creative nonfiction and one in Urban Sustainability.

It was during their graduate fieldwork that they had a conversation about open source movements in agricultural tech and how different these movements were across the globe. It was during this conversation that Taylor formed the thesis. They choose to research open source and sustainable tech through IoT data governance — a highly technical topic and an incredibly important one with the rise of green tech.

Taylor discovered an intricate web between the same surveillance economy that made them so uncomfortable in tech marketing and the way many pieces of “green” and “sustainable” tech functioned. They spent the next three years tracing a line between green tech, the data it collects, and how it’s used by police against women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ people in particular. The research became the manuscript titled Empire of Insight. 

Taylor hopes to place Empire of Insight with a publisher soon to share this unique perspective.

Taylor lives in Chicago with their partner and hound dog.