Terra Trevor is an essayist, a memoirist, a contributor to fifteen books, and the author of two memoirs, We Who Walk the Seven Ways (University of Nebraska Press), and Pushing up the Sky: A Mother's Story (KAAN: Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Families Network).
Her essays appear widely in journals and anthologies, including Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits (University of New Mexico Press), Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press), The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (University of Oklahoma Press), Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging (University of Nebraska Press), Voices Confronting Pediatric Brain Tumors (Johns Hopkins University Press), The Foster Parenting Tool Box (EMK Press), Take A Stand: Art Against Hate, and in numerous other books, anthologies, and literary journals.
Terra is the granddaughter of sharecroppers, born in 1953 and raised in a large extended family in a banjo and fiddle tradition, rich with storytelling and music. She came of age in Compton California, where her childhood was divided between city life and camping in the Sierra Nevada mountains, pulling dinner from a lake.
Of mixed descent, including Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca and German, her stories are steeped in themes of place and belonging, and are shaped and infused by her identity as a mixed-blood.
KAAN: Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network
First Edition; Hardcover 2006
out of print
New eBook Edition Compliments of Terra Trevor
"Terra Trevor’s Pushing up the Sky is a revelation of the struggles and triumphs packed into the hyphens between Korean and Native American and American. From her, we learn that adoption can best be mutual, that the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child’s ways. With unflinching honesty and unfailing love, Trevor details the risks and heartaches of taking in, the bittersweetness of letting go, and the everlasting bonds that grow between them all. With ‘Pushing up the Sky’, the ‘literature of adoption’ comes of age as literature, worthy of an honored place in the human story."
—Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education
University of Nebraska Press, 2023
We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After enduring the difficult loss she wrote about in her memoir Pushing up the Sky, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in their Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.
With tender honesty, Trevor explores how the end is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.
“Raised to conceal her Native ancestry, Terra Trevor learns from elders to nurture her mixed blood identity and shape her activism in transracial adoption, Indian health and education, and community building. This is an inspiring, heartfelt memoir of one Native woman’s spirit journey from childhood to her own elderhood.”
—Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education
