Terry Blackhawk was born in California and spent her childhood in Massachusetts, Georgia and Indiana. After earning a B.A. in Literature from Antioch College, she moved to Detroit where she worked for social justice, taught in the public schools and raised a son. Since 1988, her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals such as Nimrod, Michigan Quarterly Review, Florida Review, and Marlboro Review. She has two chapbooks Trio: Voices from the Myths and Greatest Hits 2003) in addition to Body & Field (MSU Press), and Escape Artist (BkMk Press), which won the 2002 John Ciardi Prize. She has won the Foley Prize and was finalist for the Glasgow Prize, the Paumanok Award, and two Marlboro Prizes. Other awards include the United Black Artists 1994 Pioneering Teacher in the Arts Award, Detroit MetroTimes Progressive Hero, Michigan Governors' Award for Arts Education, and ArtServe Michigan's Arts Educator of the Year. In 1995 she founded InsideOut Literary Arts Project, www.insideoutdetroit.org, a non profit writers-in-schools program now serving over 2,500 students annually in Detroit schools.

Other poems by Terry Blackhawk in Verse Daily:
March 2, 2004:  "Leda" "All day long I twisted..."
December 30, 2003:  "After Years of Ethnographic Research, Professor Jones Retires to the Tropics" "Don't get me wrong...."
September 7, 2003:  "Escape Artist" "A crow does not merely open its beak to cry..."

Books by Terry Blackhawk: The Dropped Hand, Escape Artist, Body & Field, Trio: Voices from the myths

Other poems on the web by Terry Blackhawk:
"On The Mockingbird Singing In The Morning In The Barrio A Few Blocks From The Boardwalk On The Beach In Venice, California"

About The Dropped Hand:

"Death gains on us. It honors neither time nor place nor human quest for meaning. Its emblem might be, as it is in these fine elegies, a dropped hand of playing cards: ‘abrupt and final / silence.’ If that were all, the bravery of the poet would be much, but Terry Blackhawk wrests from this strict vista a powerful antithesis. With patience and wisdom and, above all, with love, she crafts the vessel that counters dissolution. It is poetry’s dream to do just this."
—Linda Gregerson

"The Dropped Hand, Terry Blackhawk masterfully weaves threads of loss and grief into a fine tapestry that is both personal and universal.This is, I think, Dr. Blackhawk’s finest and most moving collection."
—Naomi Long Madgett

"I love the poetry of Terry Blackhawk, above all else, for its heart, always searching for 'something bursting with spring and belief.' Through the poems in The Dropped Hand she teaches us both how to hold on and how to let go of those we love. These compassionate poems reach out through the complex world to find the connections that sustain us. She celebrates our exposed places, the places where we are most vulnerable and most human. We so often cover up those places — it takes a magician like Terry Blackhawk to reveal to us what was there all along."
—Jim Daniels