Terri Lewis

Terri Lewis fell in love with medieval history in college. Not the dates or wars, but the mysterious daily lives of the people. Building on this love, she read and traveled widely, and finally, two sentences in a book bought at Windsor Castle led her to write her debut novel, Behold the Bird in Flight, A Novel of an Abducted Queen. Published in Embark, Hippocampus, Denver Quarterly, Blue Mesa Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review among others, she was accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She has taken multiple workshops at Lighthouse, including Litfest advanced weeklong workshops with Laura van den Berg, Amitava Kumar, Emily Rapp Black, and Rebecca Makkai. A finalist for The Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize (Nonfiction) and shortlisted for LitMag's Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, she won the Bethesda Literary Festival Award and the 2025 Miami University Press Novella Prize. She reviews for The Washington Independent Review of Books. Before she was an author, she had career as a ballet dancer in Denver and Germany, ran a dance company in Arkansas, earned a B.A. in history and education, and an M.A. in theater, not necessarily in that order. She lives with her husband and two lively dogs in Denver, Colorado.