The River's Daughter

Terry Hermsen has lived in Ohio since 1972. He was a B.A. in English from Wittenberg University, an MFA in poetry from Goddard College, and a Ph.D. in art education from the Ohio State University, and currently teaches poetry, composition and literature at Otterbein College. From 1979 to 2004, he taught poetry all around the state via the Ohio Arts Council's Artists in Education program, with students from kindergarten through high school, as well as senior citizens and other adults. For five summers he was on the faculty of the Antioch Writers Workshop--and he taught in the first five years of the Ohio Arts Council's Experience of Writing summer workshops for teachers, co-editing (with Bob Fox) the anthology which grew out of those years, Teaching Writing from a Writer's Point of View. Additionally, he was on the faculty of the OAC's Summer Media Institute from 1998-2003. He has taught poetry in the galleries of various museums throughout the state, including the Allen Art Museum in Oberlin, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art--and for seven years was a guest poet with the Columbus Museum of Art's DepARTures program, guiding 5th graders from around the city on poetry writing tours of the museum. He has published numerous articles on the teaching of poetry with Teachers & Writers Collaborative and Teaching Artist Journal. He has published poems in many magazines, including Descant, South Dakota Review, The Journal, Antigonish, Confluence, and Orion, as well as two chapbooks with Bottom Dog Press, 36 Spokes: The Bicycle Poems and Child Aloft in Ohio Theatre. With David Garrison, he co-edited O Taste and See: Food Poems, which reached audiences all over the country through readings in restaurants in Seattle, Brooklyn, Chicago, Dayton and other cities. He lives in Delaware with his wife Leslie and their adopted children, Noel and Noah. His daughter Isa is a student at Capital University Law School.