Claudia Taylor is soft-spoken, with a vocal cadence that sounds as if she is reciting a verse from a poem. It feels fitting then, that Ms. Taylor has been named Martha’s Vineyard poet laureate for the 2024–2026 season.

On Saturday, June 8 the community will gather at Featherstone Center for the Arts to celebrate her new position. The program begins at 4 p.m.

Ms. Taylor is a life-long Vineyarder, having grown up in Vineyard Haven before her family relocated to West Tisbury. She first left the Vineyard at age 20 for the UK, where she earned a BA in English and education from the University of York and then a master’s degree in children’s literature from Cambridge.

She currently works at Edgartown Library as its programs coordinator, a role she adores, along with the wider Island community.

“The sense of community we have — not just in West Tisbury, but on the whole Island — is very special and important,” she said.

Despite Ms. Taylor’s affection for both literature and the Vineyard, becoming the next poet laureate was not something she set out to do. In fact, she had agreed to serve on this year’s selection committee before recusing herself at the last minute to submit an application.

Within weeks, she would be named poet laureate.

“It’s kind of shocking. I was so excited,” she said. “I feel like I’m still having a little bit of impostor syndrome.”

Ms. Taylor’s life as a poet stretches back to her childhood. At age 11, she started reading and writing voraciously. She recalls a constant stream of submissions she submitted to PoetryZone, a children’s poetry website run by English poet Roger Stevens. She calls Mr. Stevens her first real mentor.

She began developing a personal style as a teenager, connecting with the confessional poets — Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell — who introduced to her the concept of poetry as an emotional outlet.

Recently, she has been inspired by Anne Carson, whose artistic focus on the family unit has left an imprint on her work.

“[Ms. Carson] has that very reflective view in her poetry of her family, her upbringing and her experiences as a child,” she said. “That’s a poetic theme I’ve been reaching toward more and more.”

The Island, and her loved ones who live here, are central to her body of work. She writes about the “heartbreakingly bright blue” skies in Chilmark and about playing with her twin sister in the bathtub at her parents’ first home in Vineyard Haven. One poem, called My Delights, is a tribute to her great grandmother, Trudy Taylor, who wrote a book of prose poetry on life’s small joys.

Each poet laureate’s task is to strengthen the presence of poetry on the Island, and Ms. Taylor is looking forward to serving the community that has shaped her.

For her, this means creating an Island that showcases physical evidence of the art it produces. She remembers being inspired years ago by a VTA program that displayed local poets’ work inside buses — a program she hopes to restore. She also wants to lead nature walks that double as poetry workshops to highlight the bond between Vineyard poetry and the Island’s natural beauty.

“Having poetry physically out in the community would be really cool,” she said.

As Edgartown Library’s programs coordinator, she plans to make the local libraries central to her programming efforts. She’ll host poetry workshops and readings that are for everybody, regardless of age, skill level or experience. She hopes, in particular, to amplify the Island’s marginalized artistic voices.

“We have such a vibrant immigrant community here on the Island, and I feel like that is such an untapped goldmine of creative expression,” she said.

Outside of writing, Ms. Taylor enjoys podcasts and watching lectures on YouTube (a hobby she insists is “weird”). Having grown up in a musical family, she says a love affair with music was inevitable. She sings and she listens to everything, from rap and classical to traditional music from cultures around the world. She’s particularly fond of Hozier.

“Not to bring things back to poetry, but I think he is such a poet,” she said.

For Ms. Taylor, all of life’s roads lead back to poetry. As poet laureate, she hopes to help others see their lives that way, too.

“I’m thinking of this role as a community endeavor,” she said. “[It’s] about bringing poetry to people who love it.”