Whitney Terrell

Whitney Terrell
Born (1967-10-03) October 3, 1967
Kansas City, Missouri
Occupation Writer, Author, Assistant Professor
Alma mater Princeton University; University of Iowa
Genres Fiction, Nonfiction

Whitney Terrell (born October 3, 1967) is an American writer and educator from Kansas City, Missouri. Terrell has published two novels and his writing has appeared in Harper's Magazine, Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, and others.

Early life, education, personal life

Whitney Terrell was born in Kansas City, Missouri and attended high school at The Pembroke Hill School. He earned a bachelor's degree in English Literature from Princeton University in 1991.[1] In 1992 Terrell moved to Iowa City, where he completed his MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. During his time at University of Iowa, Terrell studied with James Alan McPherson who sparked his interest in writing about race in Kansas City, which is the focus of Terrell's two novels.[2]

Terrell lives in Kansas City, Missouri with his wife and two children. He has taught at The University of Missouri–Kansas City since 2004.

Professional life

After earning his master's degree, Terrell worked as a fact checker for The New York Observer. From 1996 to 2001 Terrell taught at Rockhurst University in Kansas City and became the Writer in Residence from 2000 to 2003.[3]

His first novel, The Huntsman, was published in 2001. The novel centers on a young African American who elbows his way into Kansas City's white, upper-class society while searching for answers about his family's past. The New York Times chose it as a notable book and The Kansas City Star and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch selected it as a best book of 2001.[4]

In 2005, Terrell published his second novel, The King of Kings County. This book elaborated on the relationship between real estate and race in Kansas City, tracing the life of an ambitious developer who uses racial covenants to build a segregated suburban empire. The book won the William Rockhill Nelson[5] award and was named a best book of 2005 by The Christian Science Monitor.[6]

In 2006 Terrell was named to a list of best writers under 40 by a panel of National Book Critics Circle Award members.[7]

In 2006 and 2010, Terrell embedded with the U.S. Army in Iraq.[8] He covered the war for The Washington Post Magazine, Slate and NPR.

Terrell was the Hodder Fellow at Princeton University for 2008–2009 and a visiting lecturer in 2011.[9] He was the New Letters Writer-in-Residence at the University of Missouri-Kansas City from 2004 to 2014.[10] In 2014 he became an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at UMKC.[11]

Terrell's third book A Good Lieutenant: A Novel was published in June 2016 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Terrell also has a podcast.

Selected bibliography

Books

  • The Good Lieutenant: A Novel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2016 ISBN 0374164738
  • The King of Kings County, Viking Penguin, August 2005 ISBN 0670034258
  • The Huntsman, Viking Penguin, August 2001 ISBN 0670894656

Reviews

The Good Lieutenant

  • "The Good Lieutenant is a stirring performance grounded in the hard realities of combat. The human beauty here is of the brutal variety, complex, dark, and impossible to forget. Lieutenant Emma Fowler is our guide into a contemporary heart of darkness. This novel should be read by all." ―Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead
  • "So exhilarating in its tautly rendered, faultless reality, so timeless in it's play of human emotion in extremis, The Good Lieutenant dazzles and shames us as it breaks our hearts. Whitney Terrell, in Lieutenant Emma Fowler, makes real the confused politics, personal heroism, and human cost of the Iraq War. The Good Lieutenant joins the ranks of great war novels that explain, too late, why 'victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.'" ―Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Quiet Dell
  • "With The Good Lieutenant, Whitney Terrell has unwound the myths of one of our most encrusted literary forms―the war novel―and remade it to be humane and honest, glowingly new and true. Terrell knows his facts on the ground, but this is emphatically, triumphantly a work of imagination and literary ingenuity. It opens in conflagration―everything having gone wrong for Lieutenant Emma Fowler in one explosive instant―and from there the mystery of how did we get to this disastrous moment unfolds backwards, Memento-like, as we watch Emma become more innocent, her life more full of hope and possibility, with each day less of war that she has experienced. This is brilliant, bold, heartbreaking storytelling for material that demands nothing less." ―Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son

The King of Kings County

  • "The only thing to be said against King is that there should be more of it: Terrell could bite harder when it comes to the city dwellers who flee to suburbia, and more pages could be devoted to Elmore Haywood, Alton's black partner, who lures his friends into Alton's devilish mortgages and winds up golfing in that ominous downtown. Other characters flit in and out enticingly: Jack's forgiving, faithful mother; mobsters who smile like malevolent eels; even Kansas City's massive brick mansions, resonating 'the weird, magnificent emptiness of the continent's middle, which no one ever expressly comes to see.' Terrell's mythic yet utterly sensible novel offers at least a stunning glimpse."―Entertainment Weekly[12]
  • "This is Terrell's second novel, following a well-received debut in 2001 called The Huntsman, which also focused on Kansas City. With another novel this good, he'll put Kansas City on the literary map with Anne Tyler's Baltimore and William Kennedy's Albany. An immense amount of historical and financial research underpins The King of Kings County, and yet all that detail is gracefully integrated into a story that is essentially about fathers and sons, the way each generation creates or miscreates a home for the next one. By the time Jack finishes what begins as a stinging indictment of his father, he's making a quiet plea for his own forgiveness."―The Washington Post[13]
  • "Real estate is not for the faint of heart - in fact, home-buying has been known to reduce some of us sensitive types to sobbing heaps of jelly. But the deals at the heart of The King of Kings County, Whitney Terrell's fine novel, are enough to make even the most hardened land baron flinch."―The Christian Science Monitor,[14]

The Huntsman

  • "It isn't hard to figure out who killed Clarissa, the rebellious daughter of a Kansas City judge, whose friendship with a black ex-con rocked the social establishment. It's far more rewarding, though, to follow Terrell's mournful analysis of the forces that changed, and are still changing, the city's racial dynamics. Terrell works through character, shaping his story from memories that career through time, pausing at pivotal scenes that catch people all unaware and unguarded. The person he follows most closely is Booker Short, an angry black youth who has processed his identity from the mythic history passed on by his grandfather, an old man with a keen grudge. But the author is just as scrupulous with characters who merely pass by. Like a camera, he records 'visions at once hilarious and sad' of an anonymous woman clinging to a talisman in a hotel room, a soldier in a stockade about to die, old men observing an annual ritual of their vanished youth. Clarissa was a silly girl, but she didn't die in vain, to give us such a talent."―The New York Times,[15]
  • "What Terrell provides instead is a Dreiseresque study of Kansas City in the nineties, in all its complicated manners and minutiae. An unsung corner of the American landscape, the city is the real hero here, as white and black, rich and poor, old and young collide. Terrell is not a wholly original writer, but he's excellent at what he does—creating real characters, making them interact in telling ways, and transporting us into his own physical and psychological geography."―The New Yorker[16]

References

  1. ↑ "Embedded at Princeton | Princeton Alumni Weekly". paw.princeton.edu. Retrieved 11 November 2016.
  2. ↑ The University of Iowa News Service Released 7 September 2001.
  3. ↑ The Magazine of Rockhurst University. Published Spring 2002.
  4. ↑ Rocky Mountain News. Mary J. Elkins. 26 August 2015
  5. ↑ The Kansas City Star. 1 April 2007.
  6. ↑ The Christian Science Monitor. Yvonne Zipp. 9 September 2005.
  7. ↑ Up and Comers: The Young Turks with a Pen. Publisher's Weekly. 1 June 2006.
  8. ↑ National Public Radio. Broadcast 12 May 2008.
  9. ↑ The Hodder Fellowship Princeton University. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  10. ↑ A Writer at Home: Whitney Terrell. The Kansas City Public Library. 2 April 2012.
  11. ↑ UMKC English Department Retrieved 30 June 2015.
  12. ↑ Entertainment Weekly'. Published August 24, 2005.
  13. ↑ The Washington Post. Published August 14, 2005.
  14. ↑ The Christian Science Monitor September 9, 2005.
  15. ↑ The New York Times August 19, 2001.
  16. ↑ The New Yorker September 3, 2001.
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