Terri Windling: biography

"If there is a single person at the nexus of fantasy literature, it is Terri Windling -- as editor, as writer, as painter, as muse." -- Jane Yolen

Terri Windling is a writer, editor, and artist specializing in fantasy literature and mythic arts. She has published over forty books, winning nine World Fantasy Awards, the Mythopoeic Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and placing on the short list for the Tiptree Award. She received the S.F.W.A. Solstice Award in 2010 for "outstanding contributions to the speculative fiction field as a writer, editor, artist, educator, and mentor." Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Russian, Turkish, Korean, and Japanese.

As a writer: Windling has published mythic fiction for both adults and young adults, as well as magical picture books for children. Her essays on myth, folklore, fantasy literaturea nd mythic arts have appeared in magazines, art books and anthologies in the United States and Europe, and she has contributed to reference volumes including The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales and Panorama illustré de la fantasy & du merveilleux.

As an editor: Formerly a Senior Editor in the New York publishing industry, Windling now creates and edits book series for a variety of U.S. publishing houses, and serves as an editorial consultant for the Tor Books fantasy line. She has published numerous anthologies for adult, young adult, and middle-grade readers -- many of them co-edited with Ellen Datlow and created around myth and fairy tale themes. Winding and Datlow edited the award-winning Year's Best Fantasy & Horror annual volumes (St. Martin's Press) for sixteen years -- publishing the works of A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Vikram Chandra, Susanna Clarke, Charles de Lint, Louise Erdrich, Pierrette Fleutiaux, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Ursula Le Guin, Gregory Maguire, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Steven Millhauser, Haruki Murakami, Peter Straub, Jane Yolen, and other writers of magical literature from around the globe. Windling also created the Bordertown series of books for teen readers, a pioneering work in the urban fantasy genre. She was also the founder and co-editor (with Midori Snyder) of the online Journal of Mythic Arts, which ran for eleven years and won the 2008 World Fantasy Award.

As an artist: Windling's art has appeared in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including shows at The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, The Words and Pictures Museum, and The Book Arts Gallery. Group exhibitions have included DreamWeavers (a touring show of fantastical art), Fées (a French museum show of fairy tale illustration from the 12th to 21st centuries), Sir Lanval (a French and English show of art inspired by the medieval Lais of Marie de France), and Ancient Spirit, Modern Voice (an international survey of modern mythic art).

Windling grew up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and studied literature, myth, & folklore at Antioch Collage/Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio (with periods abroad in London and Dublin). She has lived in New York City; Boston, Massachusetts; and the desert outskirts of Tucson, Arizona. She now resides in a small village on Dartmoor, in England's West Country, with her husband, dramatist Howard Gayton, and step-daughter, Victoria Windling-Gayton.

For more information, please visit the Terri Windling Studio website.