Terra Trevor is an essayist and memoirist, a contributor to fifteen books, and the author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways (University of Nebraska Press). Her essays appear widely in anthologies and literary journals, including Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits (University of New Mexico Press), Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press), The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (University of Oklahoma Press), Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging (University of Nebraska Press), Voices Confronting Pediatric Brain Tumors (Johns Hopkins University Press), Take A Stand: Art Against Hate (A Raven Chronicles Anthology), and Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought.
She is the granddaughter of Oklahoma sharecroppers, born in the early 1950s and raised in a large extended family in a banjo and fiddle tradition, rich with storytelling and music. She grew up on the border between Compton and Paramount, California, where her childhood was divided between city life and camping in the Sierra Nevada mountains, pulling dinner from a lake. Of mixed descent, including Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, German, her stories are steeped in themes of place and belonging, and are shaped and infused by her identity as a mixed-blood, and her connection to the landscape.