Candacy Taylor

Candacy Taylor is an author, photographer, and an award-winning cultural documentarian. She is the author of Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America,^[1] which explored the legacy of the Green Book.^[2] Overground Railroad made the New York Times'^[3] list of notable books of 2020, Oprah Magazine's^[4] top 26 travel books, and National Geographic's^[5] top 10 list of books by adventurous women. An adaptation of Overground Railroad for young adult readers won the Carter G. Woodson Book Award in 2023.^[6]

Taylor has documented the architecture of buildings listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book.^[7]

Taylor was a fellow at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University^[8] under the direction of Henry Louis Gates Jr. She curated The Negro Motorist Green Book, a 3,500-square-foot exhibition that has toured 13 US museums as part of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES)^[9] from 2020 to 2025, including the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum.^[10]

Her projects have been commissioned, funded, and archived by the Library of Congress,^[11] The National Endowment for the Humanities,^[12] National Geographic^[13] The National Park Service, the National Trust,^[14] the Graham Foundation^[15] The American Council of Learned Societies,^[16] and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture^[17] at the New York Public Library. Her work has been featured in dozens of media outlets^{[citation needed]} including The Atlantic,^[18] CBS Sunday Morning,^[19] The Economist,^[20] The Los Angeles Times,^[21] The New York Times,^[22] The New Yorker,^[23] Newsweek,^[24] Fortune Magazine,^[25] Time Magazine,^[26] and Viceland.^[27]

She turned her master's degree thesis at the California College of the Arts into Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress,^[28] that featured women 50 and older who had waitressed for up to 60 years.^[29]