Personal profile

About

A Mississippi native, Terry Engel grew up dreaming of white-water rivers and mountains, and he has traveled widely and lived in Colorado and Alaska. He worked with wolves at the Anchorage Zoo, and in graduate school he spent weekends paddling tannin stained, cypress lined creeks and exploring the national forest that is the setting for Natchez at Sunset, his first novel, available from Adelaide Books in New York. Much of his writing explores the slow rhythms of the South and its deep pine and bottomland hardwood forests, open pastureland and fields, tannin stained and cypress lined creeks, and its people.

Engel studied Forest Resources at Mississippi State University and worked as quality control and production supervisor in particleboard mills and wood preservative treatment plants. He worked as a lineman building high voltage powerlines for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and he has held other jobs selling books, suppressing fires for the Mississippi Forestry Commission, working assembly lines, painting houses, and delivering exotic birds to pet stores. He earned a Ph.D. in writing from the University of Southern Mississippi, where he studied at the Center for Writers with Frederick and Stephen Barthelme. His work has appeared in a number of literary journals and magazines, including The Sun, Mississippi Review, Georgetown Review, Open City, Buffalo Spree, Cream City Review, Dreamers Literary Magazine, Cave Region Review, and River River Journal. and he has received the Transatlantic Review Award, won the Hemingway Days Short Story Writing Contest, and received honorable mention from Pushcart Prize.

Research interests

Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Contemporary Literature, 20th Century literature

Related documents

Disciplines

  • English Language and Literature