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About Teri

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, winner of the 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize  (Mad Creek Books, 2021) and Haint, (Gival Press, 2021) winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry.
 
In 2022 she was one of two state-wide winners of a Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist Award. She is the 2020 winner of the Poetry Society of America's (PSA) Robert H. Winner Memorial Award and a finalist for the PSA's George Bogin Memorial Award. She is the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts grant and a Meret grant from the Freya Project.
 
A Cave Canem fellow, she has been awarded scholarships, residencies and fellowships to attend the Community of Writers Workshop, Hedgebrook, the Soul Mountain Writer’s Retreat, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is on the Advisory Council of Split This Rock (a biennial poetry festival in Washington DC) and a member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective. She has been a semi-finalist and finalist judge for the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Out Loud.
 
Her work has been published in many anthologies including: Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry JamGathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First DecadeGrowing Up Girl, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets & Emcees, The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, Not Without Our Laughter: poems of joy, humor, and sexuality, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic, Rocked By The Waters, and Choice Words. Her work can be read online and in the following journals: Academy of American Poets, ArLiJo, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Delaware Poetry Review, Figure 1, Fledgling Rag, Gargoyle, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Kestrel, Little Patuxent Review, Love’s Executive Order, Natural Bridge, North American Review, Mom Egg Review, MiPOesias, Pacifica Literary Review, PANK, Poetry DailyPoet Lore, Poetry Ireland Review, Raising Mothers, Rosebud, Tin House, Torch, and Sligo Journal.

She was the HoCoPoLitSo (Howard County Poetry and Literature Society) Writer-in-Residence for 2019-2020 and an adjunct professor at George Washington University for 2019-2020. She is the Poetry Coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. and lives in Maryland with her husband, poet Hayes Davis and their two children.
Teri smiles at the camera in a red scoopneck shirt, a gold necklace and red lipstick.

Photos  by Mignonette Dooley Johnson

Teri Hermitage 2021.jpeg
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