Terry Blackhawk is Founding Director (1995-2015) of Detroit's InsideOut Literary Arts Project (iO), a poets-in-schools program dedicated to encouraging young people to "think broadly, create bravely, and share their voices with the wider world." Blackhawk began writing poetry during her career as a Detroit high school teacher. She received the 1990 Foley Poetry Award, the 2010 Pablo Neruda Prize, the 2013 Springfed Arts Poetry Prize and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. Her poetry collections include body & field (Michigan State University Press, 1999), Escape Artist (BkMk Press, 2003), selected by Molly Peacock for the John Ciardi Prize; The Dropped Hand (2nd Edition, Lotus Press, imprint of WSU Press 2011); The Light Between (Wayne State University Press, 2012) and three chapbooks. Before her retirement, she co-edited To Light a Fire: Twenty Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project (WSU Press, 2015) with iO Senior Writer Peter Markus. The collection chronicles the growth of iO from her classroom teaching and features essays by writers who have brought the gift of poetry to children and youth in Detroit. In addition to K-12 teaching, Blackhawk has taught creative writing pedagogy for graduate students at Oakland University and developed courses on ekphrastic writing that she taught on site at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She has a strong interest in Emily Dickinson and has presented at conferences and published essays and poems about the poet. She was twice named Creative Writing Educator of the Year by the Michigan Youth Arts Festival (1990, 2008) where she led the annual festival poetry workshop during the 1990s. Blackhawk was named a Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow in 2013. She holds a BA in Literature from Antioch College and a Ph.D. in Language Arts Education from Oakland University, which granted her an Honorary Doctorate in 2014. A long time Detroit resident and avid birder, she divides her time between Detroit and her family in Connecticut.

Other poems by Terry Blackhawk in Verse Daily:
March 20, 2012:   "The Burn" "I saw it once in a sycamore..."
December 25, 2007:   "A Blessing" "David says his soul..."
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:

Other poems on the web by Terry Blackhawk:
Two poems
Four poems
Five poems

Terry Blackhawk's Website.

Terry Blackhawk on Twitter.

About One Less River:

"With Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as companion compass points, Terry Blackhawk crosses again and again that boundary between self and the world in sharp, angular sensual lyrics that spread as she writes in one poem like "haloes upward in luminous / turquoise rings." What she finds in One Less River is kinship with all manner of creatures and alternate selves connected to water. In one poem, an array of thriving arthropods; later, a dying Ivory Gull under a bridge over the Flint River. And friends—a wary friend, friend gone missing, friend who has crossed over. In this elastic world Blackhawk seeks and dissolves like the wafer in one poem until she finds that infinite space Dickinson called "noon." A palindrome. Infinity on its side. A place of no shadows except those cast by these richly imagined poems."
—Dennis Hinrichsen

"Rivers run through Terry Blackhawk's new collection: the Detroit River with its extinct fresh water mussels, their lovely, evocative names juxtaposed against what remains—"the rusted manhole cover and the chipping paint;" the Tallahatchie, which inspires a tender, moving reference to the memory of Emmett Till. In "Nauset," as if following the course of a river, a woman returns to the sea to build a shelter among the dunes, living alone with the elements until she hears the waves "sing to her" and is restored. Deep under the currents of One Less River is an unspecified story of loss and recovery, of grief and the many meandering paths away from grief. This is a luminous and rewarding book."
—Patricia Hooper

"Here come Terry Blackhawk's wonderful poems, naming things with tender precision, imagination, humor, and an astute suspicion of what lies behind the come-on (erotic or evangelical). As the poems walk along the water, the sea, the river, the strait, with Whitman and Dickinson and all the creatures of the water and the air for company—not ignoring the children sickened by some of those waters—Blackhawk is a pilgrim continually seeking some cloister, "an opening to duck into," a shack in the dunes, a shell emptied of some other, the body with its eyes closed in death, where the mind and heart might rest in love. To paraphrase Elizabeth Bishop, this book penetrates into a depth of knowledge that is dark, salt, clear, moving, and utterly free."
—Patrick Donnelly