Biography

The first born of a Chicago World War II airman and a Southern Belle who met at a USO dance in Little Rock, Arkansas, Terry spent her early years enjoying the tall buildings and short grasses of Peter Stuyvesant Town, a veterans’ housing project in Lower Manhattan before her family moved north to the burbs where she briefly served as a Smokey the Bear deputy.

Terry studied at the Indiana University School of Music and the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory, first majoring in piano, then harpsichord. Practicing was often interrupted by the lure of anti-war protests and Earth Day celebrations as the KKK monitored student demonstrations in Bloomington, Indiana.

Terry decided that the concert life was not for her and taught first as a special education teacher and then as a regular classroom teacher in Amherst, Massachusetts, focusing on upper elementary grades. Her unique school also served as a university laboratory school, training future teachers. Days were filled with science projects, math diagrams, literature study, writing activities and history reenactments.

Near the end of her twenty-five year teaching career, she rediscovered the joys of writing poetry as she had done as a child and young adult. She earned her M.F.A. from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and began to publish.

Terry’s poetry has been influenced by her extensive travel experiences in western and eastern Europe, the Baltics, the Caucasus, India and northern Africa including two summers as a volunteer English teacher in the Republic of Georgia through USAID.  She recently moved from Massachusetts to Anchorage, Alaska, and has learned to use bear spray when exploring the “Last Frontier.”