Photo by Judy Watson Tracy
Photo by Julie Fletcher
Photo by Red Huber
Terry’s father bought this 1957 Chevrolet Bel Aire Sport Coupe right before she was born to bring her home from the hospital.
About Terry
Terry began writing poetry in earnest in 1999, inspired by her 5-year-old son’s fascination with trains. She wrote a poem called “Trains” (what else?) to some acclaim and became enamored with writing seemingly overnight. Since then she has published five books and several hundred poems in literary magazines including Poet Lore, Rosebud, The Florida Review, CALYX, Rattle, Slipstream, Harpur Palate and The Café Review.
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 read her work at several Florida venues including the Miami Book Fair International and the Kerouac Festival in Orlando, She was a featured poet at Niagara County Community College in New York after publishing her first collection, Behind Every Door, as the winner of the Slipstream Annual Poetry Chapbook Competition.
Photo by Bob McComas
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. She is a pajamas aficionado, cannot stop smiling at the Snoopy animations on her Apple watch clock face, and despises cheese.
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.
That’s Terry, with her shoulder cocked in the front, feeling glamorous even though she was only 9 and wearing a Brownie uniform.
Oliver, a blue-crowned conure, likes to swing from his cage bars by one foot for as long as the applause lasts.