Taylor Riley

Taylor Riley is a writer and journalist living in Louisville, Kentucky. She is currently a news producer and features writer at the Louisville Courier Journal and will receive her MFA from Spalding University in May 2019. She is an award-winning journalist and photographer whose work has been published by Refinery 29, USA TODAY, Associated Press, Eckleburg, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Riggwelter Press, as well as other national publications. She also does essay readings at local and regional libraries, bookstores and universities.

Quilted Northern

Lying on a pile of blankets in my grandmother’s upstairs bedroom on a breezy, October night, I was feeling both chilly—the window was open to my left— and mentally exhausted after an eight-hour drive from our home in central Kentucky to western Pennsylvania. I rested beneath my grandmother’s patchwork quilt where my boyfriend Heath and I were bedded down. I clung to the warmth of the quilt, its scent a mix of musk and mothballs.
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