Detroit Portraits Series by Nicole Macdonald
Terry Blackhawk is founder and Executive 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.” She began teaching English in 1968, after graduating from Antioch College, and took up writing poetry herself, about twenty years later, when she was already teaching it to her students. “I thought, ‘If I’m asking them to do this, I should have the same experience myself.’ I fell in love with it. I became a poet. It’s who I am.”
Terry’s 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 (Lotus Press, imprint of WSU Press 2011); The Light Between (Wayne State University Press, 2012) and three chapbooks. A fourth chapbook, One Last River, comes out from Mayapple Press in 2019. Before her retirement in 2015, 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 practice and features essays by writers who have brought the gift of poetry to children and youth in Detroit.
In addition to her K-12 teaching, Terry has taught creative writing pedagogy for graduate students in Oakland University’s Reading and Language Arts Masters Program and developed graduate level courses on ekphrastic writing that she taught on site at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She also has a strong interest in storytelling and studied with master teller Laura Simms among others. A frequent presenter at national conferences (NCTE, AWP), Terry 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. She served on the board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) from 2008-2012 and was named a Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow in 2013.
The oldest of four children, Terry remembers her youth as a sort of movable feast. Her father, Ben Bohnhorst, was a much-traveled professor of education; her mother, Marie, a pianist. There was little money, but loads of culture. “The piano followed us wherever we moved.” A long time Detroit resident, she is the mother of the historian Ned Blackhawk and grandmother to Eva and Tobias and now lives in Connecticut.