Leila Taylor

Grave dirt makes the best mud pies… 

Leila Taylor, writer, designer, cultural critic and Creative Director of Brooklyn Public Library, joins Joanna Ebenstein for a rich, wide-ranging conversation about the Gothic as both a cultural form and a lived sensibility—one that moves through memory, history, music, and space.

Drawing from her acclaimed books Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul and Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread, Taylor explores how Gothic feeling is not confined to aesthetics or subculture, but emerges through lived experience: in architecture that unsettles, in histories that re...