香蕉秀

Terrell cowrote the da Costa Greene book with Victoria Christopher Murray, and the colleagues have teamed up again for their latest effort, The First Ladies. The new book is a fictionalized account of the real-life friendship between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and the educator and civil rights icon Mary McLeod Bethune, who was known as the First Lady of the Struggle. In the novel, McLeod Bethune meets Roosevelt while she鈥檚 still a stalwart supporter of the Republican party, but the women begin to bond over their efforts to get meaningful civil rights measures passed during the Depression and World War II. Terrell said that Murray, who is Black, provides a perspective that helps the novels speak authentically to the experiences of Black women moving in white spaces. 鈥淚t鈥檚 through the trust we have in one another that we鈥檙e able to have hard conversations about race,鈥� Terrell said, 鈥渁nd then we in turn put that into our books and that鈥檚 what we see really resonate with people.鈥澛�

Growing up in Pittsburgh as the oldest of six children, Terrell was a voracious reader, but she found the prospect of writing herself to be intimidating. 鈥淭he idea that I could ever write something as profound and wondrous as the books I was reading鈥擨 couldn鈥檛 even envision that,鈥� she said. That began to change over time, though.聽

鈥淚 had a wonderful aunt who was an English professor and a poet herself, and she was actually kind of a rebellious nun,鈥� Terrell said. The turning point came when her aunt gave her The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley鈥檚 classic reimagining of the Arthurian legend, which is told from the perspective of the female characters. Particularly vivid was Arthur鈥檚 half-sister Morgan Le Fay, whose empathetic depiction contrasted with the villainous way she is portrayed in more traditional versions of the legend. 鈥淚t completely opened up my eyes to the fact that all these legends and myths have a story we have never heard, and it鈥檚 almost always the women鈥檚 stories,鈥� Terrell said.聽

She went on to major in history at 香蕉秀, then got her law degree at Boston University before spending ten years as a corporate attorney. But her interest in narrative never wavered, and she worked in her spare time on a novel about Nazi art thefts that eventually became her first book, The Chrysalis, published in 2007. She produced two young adult series and two more historical fiction books before she began writing as Marie Benedict.聽