Biography

Terry began writing poetry in earnest in 1999, inspired by her 5-year-old son’s fascination with trains. Since then she has published four books and more than 160 poems in literary magazines including Poet Lore, Rosebud, Passages North, The Florida Review, CALYX, Rattle,  Slipstream, Harpur Palate, Connecticut Review, The Café Review and Pearl. She is looking for a publisher for her new chapbook, Tango.

Terry’s poem “Produce Man” won the 2008 Rita Dove Poetry Award, judged by Naomi Shihab Nye, and her pantoum “Rwandan Mother, 1994” won the 2009 Editors’ Choice Writecorner Press Poetry Prize. She has twice been a finalist for the Dogwood Poetry Prize, the William Stafford Award for Poetry and the Paumanok Poetry Award.

She has read her work at several Florida venues including the Miami Book Fair International, the Kerouac Festival in Orlando, The Casements cultural center in Ormond Beach and the St. Augustine Poetry Rendezvous. She was a featured poet at Niagara County Community College in New York. Terry has been involved in several collaborations with visual artists, and her photograph “Osprey on a Windy Day” was chosen for inclusion in Orlando magazine’s 2014 Paint the Town exhibition. Her poem “Infusion  Fridays” was performed by an actor in The Pink Ribbon Project, a show featuring dance, drama and visual arts inspired by women battling breast cancer, in September 2011.

Born in Bangor, Maine, to an Air Force family, Terry grew up in Texas, Canada, Ohio and California’s Mojave Desert, the scene of many of her poems about adolescence. She thinks she just might go crazy if she couldn’t write poems. When she is not writing, she is feeling guilty about not writing, often while reading in the hammock on her front porch, watching the birds mob her many feeders in the garden, riding her bicycle or playing guitar and singing slightly off-key.

Terry lives in Orlando, Florida, in a townhouse that backs up to a conservation area that is home to pileated woodpeckers, hawks, wild turkeys, marsh rabbits, deer and the occasional bobcat, which she enjoys photographing. She is determined that a ruby-throated hummingbird will land on her hand soon to sip nectar from a flower ring made for this purpose. She has a pet blue-crowned conure, Oliver, who laughs exactly like she does, calls out her favorite sayings and “answers the phone.” After decades in the newspaper industry and several years as lead writer at Darden Restaurants, Terry works as a senior writer at Marriott Vacations Worldwide.