Trace Taylor
Multi-media Artist, Writer, and Filmmaker, Qualitative Researcher, Instructor-Educator and Learner, Presenter, Consultant, Primate, and Quantum Construct
Bio Brief
I came from poverty, born to a marginalized, hungry mother of 15 who’d suffered abuses prior to my birth. A variety of health issues plagued my infancy and early childhood. Just after birth, I contracted polio, though not as severe as most, severe enough to warrant corrective Frankenstein braces, lift shoes, and various other medical necessities my young mother could not afford. I suffered repeated bouts of pneumonia that very nearly killed me. The health crises vanished in my ninth year, but halfway through my 10th year, my hardworking lioness mother suffered catastrophic ovarian cancer, growing and undiagnosed since before my birth. The event left me homeless for almost a year. My mother came out of her coma, but could not work or care for us or herself, so I went to work full-time to pay bills and care for both her and my baby brother.
Riding a bicycle 14 miles to and another fourteen miles from school then seeing to my dying mother I’d had to leave in the care of my 10-year-old baby brother who rather than attending school looked after Mother and did so again when I left to work at Pizza Hut from 5 or 6 pm often until 3 or 4AM. All grown up at thirteen, I learned to work hard, do drugs, and drink. By fifteen, my mother managed to take back her role, but there was no going back from self-governance. I hit the road to see the world, returning intermittently when Mother’s remissions failed, treatments made her ill, or surgery was required. Then one day, the whole mess killed her and left me a drift in the upper North Atlantic just outside the Bay of Cadiz on a 60-foot wooden catamaran, wondering what to do with my life, and after four years, I searched for shores I might call home. In 2003, I returned to the land I felt had failed me and my small family, neither of which recovered enough of the broken pieces to regain its structure.
In 2003, shortly after my return, I met the catalyst of my evolution: my mentor. By March 2004, I became the Founding Director of a multimillion dollar emergent reader press. By 2007, I achieved national recognition as an author of exceptional emergent reader literature, with 200 plus titles used in classrooms across the country. In 2012 I founded Community Leveraged Learning (CLL) with the mission of sculpting and applying a Pedagogy of Access founded on the idea of quantum physics. Since 2012, I’ve produced an array of innovative educational opportunities for K-12, college students and adults, for educators and businesses, and built a strong network of community partners intent on building access, protecting the ecosystems, habitats, and wildlife, and supporting public education.
May of 2013, Eckerd College accepted me as a Freshman, and I graduated three years later in 2016 with a High Honors BA in Creative Writing and Anthropology along with the Eckerd Excellence in Writing nomination. I immediately entered University of South Florida in St. Petersburg (USFSP) for an interdisciplinary MLA degree. In 2017, I earned lifetime inductions into Phi Kappa Phi and Omicron Delta Kappa. Also in 2017, I conducted and funded the Boca Ciega High School Human Rights project, received recognition for a 360 film production piece, and authored the CLL Writer’s Guide, What Makes Writing Great. In March 2018, I became a Tedx speaker on access instruction and in April earned multiple Catalina Foundation Grants which were subsequently awarded again in 2019 along with an honorable MLA in interdisciplinary focuses and a seat in USF’s Curriculum and Instruction Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program.
I began my doctoral work June 2019; served as the writing curriculum and instruction pro for Dr. Susan Bennett’s Polk County Corrections USF literacy Project; won approval by USF and the Florida Prison Authority for my Writer’s Guide, What Makes Writing Great? as a key curriculum component in the literacy project; produced my 6th annual Pinellas County Teachers’ PD accredited workshop, and served as Editor on the film project for Dr. Charles Vanover’s EthnoDrama, Chicago Butah, directed by Bob Devin Jones. 2019 finished with me at SOQM 2019 as a co-presenter with Dr. Charles Vanover. 2020 started strong with invitations to present at AERA, ICQI, and ECQI 2020 alongside Dr. Charles Vanover, but these events were canceled due to the COVID 19 lockdown. I have, however, gone on to present at AERA, ICQI, and SOQM 2021 as a solo presenter and as a panel presenter with Dr. Charles Vanover and Dr. Michelle Angelo-Rocha.
Today, I study systems of energy exchange and language, ideologies, and stories across different communities of meaning in relation to individual, community, and global resilience and sustainability; explore art (especially filmmaking) as a form of research; consult on DEIB; mentor, instruct, and present; and more frequently now, produce and collaborate on some powerful projects with some remarkable and knowledgeable talents across an array of academic and professional perspectives: Social Entrepreneurs, Coders, Educators, Historians, Scientists, Philosophers, writers and editors, filmmakers, Engineers, Permaculturists and Food Foresters, etc., all purposed to the engineering of balance through equity, access, education, and arts-based research.
Trace Taylor 
