Merideth M. Taylor is Professor Emerita of Theater and Dance at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and a founding member of the African and African Diaspora and Women Studies programs at the College. She is the author of Listening in: Echoes and Artifacts from Maryland’s Mother County; co-editor of In Relentless Pursuit of an Education: African American Stories from a Century of Segregation; and screenwriter/director of the documentaries With All Deliberate Speed: One High School’s Story and Telly-Award-winning Talking and Walking Common Ground.

Her book Making a Way Out of No Way: Lives of Labor, Love, and Resistance (New Village Press, 2024) is a richly imagined, photo illustrated narrative of 150 years of life in slavery on tobacco plantations in Southern Maryland.