Terry Blackhawk earned a B.A. from Antioch College and taught English and creative writing in Detroit public schools for many years. She is the author of two full-length collections of poems—Body & Field (1999); Escape Artist (2003), winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Poetry Prize; and a chapbook, Trio: Voices from the Myths (1998).

About Body & Field:

"Poem after poem in her aptly titled Body & Field, Terry Blackhawk authenticates her immediate and richly imagined world with sensuous language and an intelligence that probles as often as it discerns. These are poems of a large spirit. I love the sensibility behind them, the eros in them, and the precision of their execution."
—Stephen Dunn

"Reading Terry Blackhawk, I am reminded of Alicia Ostriker's groundedness, of her mourning and celebration of the ordinary life, especially her love for family and friends, but where Ms. Ostriker uses bold strokes, Ms. Blackhawk's work, though just as vivid, is contained, quieter, like the jewel-like pattern of the finest needlepoint. Mostly I think of coursage, of connection to man, woman, child, animal, to all the things of the earth. I remember anepitaph written on a gravestone in an old cemetery, that it takes great courage to love that which dies so soon. Here is that courage and endurance. And her impeccable resolution with words."
—Toi Derricotte

"Body & Field is radiant, the poems filled with breathtaking pirouettes of language. The elegance of Blackhawk's poetry transforms every page into an echo of the world and the soul searching for its place in it. These are poems of resilience and tenderness, bird song and silence. Only a remarkable heart could have created them."
—Linda Nemec Foster

"Terry Blackhawk's exquisite first book of poems is one of the reasons why poetry remains an important literary force in a world where so much language is reduced to sound bytes, voice-overs and the collapsed linguistic short-hand of ad copy .... It is her astonishing diversity of subject and brilliance of metaphor that sets this first book of poems apart."
—Anne-Marie Oomen