Terry Ann Thaxton is an award-winning essayist, poet, and teaching artist. Her three collections of poems include Mud Song (2017 Truman State UP) which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and a Florida Book Award, Getaway Girl (2011 Salt) which won the 18th Annual Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize, and The Terrible Wife (2013 Salt), winner of the 2013 Florida Book Award Bronze Medal. She has published poetry in journals such as Rattle, Connecticut Review, Comstock Review, Hayden’s Ferry, West Branch, Tampa Review, and other international literary journals. Her essay “Delusions of Grandeur” won the 2013 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize at The Missouri Review. Other essays have appeared in Defunct, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fourth Genre, and Teaching Artist Journal. She is Associate Professor of English at UCF where she serves as the MFA Creative Writing Program Director. She founded and directs the Literary Arts Partnership at UCF which provides creative writing workshops to alternative populations throughout central Florida, including shelters, assisted living centers, residential treatment facilities, public schools, and prisons. She has received grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, Youth Service America, the Florida Humanities Council, and United Arts of Central Florida. Professor Thaxton’s innovations in the classroom and community teaching have earned her recognition from the academic community, as well as the local media, and at national conferences. She regularly presents her research on the link between literacy and creative writing at national conferences. Her book Creative Writing in the Community: A Guide (2014 Bloomsbury) focuses on the purposes, value, and impact of writers serving as teaching artists in their communities.

Website: www.terryannthaxton.com

Twitter Username: @terryannthaxton

Publications

• Getaway Girl: Poems , Salt Publishing (March 15, 2011)
• The Terrible Wife: Poems , Salt Publishing (February 1, 2013)
• Creative Writing in the Community: A Guide , Bloomsbury (January 1, 2014)
• Mud Song , Truman State University Press (September 1, 2017)

Awards

• Florida Book Award Bronze Medal: Poetry (The Terrible Wife)(2013)
• The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editor's Prize, Nonfiction(2012)

Employment

• Professor of English at University of Central Florida (August 2000 - )

Degrees

• Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts (July 1997)

Genres of Interest

Creative nonfiction, Poetry