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, artist, editor, and co-director of The Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts. She has published over forty books, which have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Turkish, Korean, and Japanese. She has won eight World Fantasy Awards, the Mythopoeic Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and placed on the short list for the Tiptree Award. She is a consulting editor for Tor Books (New York), sits on the advisory board of the Mythic Imagination Institute (Atlanta), and is one of the founders of Endicott West, an arts retreat (Tucson, Arizona).

As a writer: Terri has published mythic novels for adults and young adults, children's picture books, short stories, and poetry. Her essays on myth, fairy tale, and mythic arts have appeared in magazines, art books and anthologies in the US, UK, and France, and she has contributed to reference volumes including The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales and Panorama illustré de la fantasy & du merveilleux.

As an artist: Terri's paintings and collages have appeared in solo and group exhibitions in various venues in the US and Europe, including The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, The Words and Pictures Museum, and The Book Arts Gallery. Her work toured the US in the "DreamWeavers" exhibition (1994), and was included in "Fée," a French museum show of fairy tale illustration from the 12th to 21st centuries (2002), and in "Ancient Spirit, Modern Voice," an exhibition of modern mythic art (Atlanta, 2004). She was also one of the originators (with Alan Lee and curator June Ashburner) of the long-running Mythic Gardens sculpture exhibitions in the west of England.

As an editor: Terri worked as Fantasy Editor for two New York publishing houses in the 1980s. Since leaving New York, she has created & edited various book series (such as "Fairy Tales" and "Borderlands") and published over 30 anthologies of magical fiction for adults and children -- including the award-winning Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series (St. Martin's Press), which she co-edited with Ellen Datlow for sixteen years. She is best known for creating volumes of stories based on myth, folklore, and fairy tale themes -- such as The Armless Maiden, which used fairy tale fiction to explore the subject of child abuse (and to raise money for a children's shelter), and her recent anthology of "trickster tales": The Coyote Road.

Terri was raised on the east coast of America, studied at Antioch University in Ohio, and has lived in New York, Boston, London, Dublin, and Mexico. Since 1990 she has divided her time between a 400-year-old thatch-roofed cottage in Devon, England, and a winter retreat in the Arizona desert.