Taylor Mali
Taylor Mali is an American slam poet, humorist, teacher, and voice actor. He was born in New York City on March 28, 1965, and grew up there. He finished Collegiate School in 1983, earned a BA in English from Bowdoin College in 1987, and completed an MA in English/Creative Writing at Kansas State University in 1993. His mother, Jane L. Mali, was a children’s book author, and his father, H. Allen Mali, worked in a business.
Mali has been a key figure in slam poetry, performing with several National Poetry Slam teams and winning four championships (1996 with Team Providence; 1997, 2000, and 2002 with Team NYC-Urbana). He is best known for the poem “What Teachers Make,” which inspired the essay collection What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World (2012).
He has released four CDs, and his work has appeared in many anthologies. He cites influences such as Billy Collins, Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver, and Naomi Shihab Nye. Mali served as president of Poetry Slam Incorporated and helped run the Page Meets Stage reading series at the Bowery Poetry Club. He retired from National Poetry Slam competition in 2005 but continues to perform and teach.
His chapbook The Whetting Stone won the 2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize. Mali has taught English, history, and math at private schools and now lectures and conducts workshops around the world. In 2001, with a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he developed a one-man show called Teacher! Teacher! about poetry, teaching, and math.
On the personal side, Mali has been married three times. His first wife was Rebecca Ruth Tauber; they married in 1993 and separated in 2004. His second wife was Marie-Elizabeth Mundheim (2006–2012). Since 2013 he has been married to Rachel Kahan. They had a son in 2015 and a daughter in 2017. In 2015, a rebuttal poem by Melissa Lozada-Oliva to Mali’s work drew attention at the National Poetry Slam.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 09:20 (CET).