Terra Trevor is an essayist and the author of two memoirs, We Who Walk the Seven Ways (University of Nebraska Press), and Pushing up the Sky (Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network). She is a contributor to fifteen books in Native studies, Native literature, creative nonfiction and memoir. Her essays have appeared in many 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), Take A Stand: Art Against Hate: A Raven Chronicles Anthology, and in numerous other books and literary journals. 

 

Terra is the granddaughter of sharecroppers, born in 1953, and raised in a large extended family in a banjo and fiddle tradition, rich with storytelling and music. She came of age in Compton, 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 and 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. She lives with her family on the California coast, based between the ocean and redwoods, and calls the mountains home. 

Photo courtesy of author