Terri Windling

Terri Windling (born December 3, 1958, in Fort Dix, New Jersey) is an American editor, artist, essayist, and the author of books for both children and adults.

She has won nine World Fantasy Awards, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, and her collection The Armless Maiden appeared on the short-list for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.

Terri Windling was born on December 3, 1958, in Fort Dix, New Jersey.

She was raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

She attended Antioch College, graduating in 1979.

After college, she moved to New York and worked in publishing as an editor and an artist.

In the American publishing field, Windling has been one of the primary creative forces behind the mythic fiction resurgence that began in the early 1980s, through her work as an innovative editor for the Ace and Tor Books fantasy lines and as the editor of more than thirty anthologies of magical fiction.

She created the Fairy Tale Series of novels that reinterpret classic fairy tales.

She is also recognized as one of the founders of urban fantasy, having published and promoted the first novels of Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, and other pioneers of the genre.

With Ellen Datlow, Windling edited 16 volumes of Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (1986–2003), an anthology that reached beyond the boundaries of genre fantasy to incorporate magic realism, surrealism, poetry, and other forms of magical literature.

Datlow and Windling also edited the Snow White, Blood Red series of literary fairy tales for adult readers, as well as many anthologies of myth & fairy tale inspired fiction for younger readers, such as The Green Man, The Faery Reel, and The Wolf at the Door.

Windling also created and edited the Borderland series for teenage readers, and The Armless Maiden, a fiction collection intended for adult survivors of child abuse like herself.

As an author, Windling's fiction includes The Wood Wife (winner of the Mythopoeic Award for Novel of the Year) and several children's books: The Raven Queen, The Changeling, A Midsummer Night's Faery Tale, The Winter Child, and The Faeries of Spring Cottage.

Her essays on myth, folklore, magical literature and art have been widely published in newsstand magazines, academic journals, art books, and anthologies.

She was a contributor to The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, edited by Jack Zipes.

Windling is the founder of the Endicott Studio, an organization dedicated to myth-inspired arts, and was the co-editor with Midori Snyder of The Journal of Mythic Arts from 1987 until it ceased publication in 2008.

She also sits on the board of the Mythic Imagination Institute.

Since the early 1990s she has resided in Devon, England; she divided her time between there and Tucson, Arizona, for many years.

Windling is a close friend and neighbor of artists Wendy and Brian Froud, and has collaborated with them on several projects.

The latter Young Adult shared-world series features the intersection of Elfland and human lands, which is generally populated by teenagers, runaways, and exiles.

Primary series writers are Ellen Kushner, Charles de Lint, Midori Snyder, Emma Bull, and Will Shetterly.

The series consists of five anthologies and three novels to date.

In September 2008, Windling married Howard Gayton, a British dramatist and co-founder of the Ophaboom Theatre Company, a Commedia dell'arte troupe.

In 2010, Windling received the SFWA Solstice Award, which honors "individuals with a significant impact on the speculative fiction field".

Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Lithuanian, Turkish, Russian, Japanese, and Korean.

In May 2016, Windling gave the fourth annual Tolkien Lecture at Pembroke College, Oxford, speaking on the topic of fantasy literature in the post-Tolkien era.

In 2020, she announced the establishment of a publishing company, Bumblehill Press.

As an artist, Windling specializes in work inspired by myth, folklore, and fairy tales.

Her art has been exhibited across the US, as well as in the UK and France.