Terra Trevor is an essayist, a memoirist, and a contributor to fifteen books. She is the author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways (University of Nebraska Press). Her essays appear widely in journals and anthologies, including Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits (University of New Mexico Press), Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press), The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (University of Oklahoma Press), Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging (University of Nebraska Press), Voices Confronting Pediatric Brain Tumors (Johns Hopkins University Press), and Take A Stand: Art Against Hate (Raven Chronicles). 

 

She is the granddaughter of sharecroppers, born in the early 1950s, and was raised in a large extended family in a banjo and fiddle tradition, rich with storytelling and music. She grew up on the border between Compton and Paramount, California, where her childhood was divided between the city and camping in the Sierra Nevada mountains, pulling dinner from a lake. Of mixed descent, including Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, German, her stories are steeped in themes of place and belonging, and are shaped and infused by her identity as a mixed-blood and her connection to the landscape. 

Photo by Lawrence K. Ho