About Me

The Official Bio:

Beth Terrell has a Masters in Special Education. She worked as a counselor and arts & crafts director at Camp Easter Seals for eight summers, taught in a comprehensive development classroom for eleven years, and taught resource Reading, Math, and English to 7th, 8th, and 9th graders for a year before spending taking a two-year sabbatical and working the next sixteen years in educational assessment. She has a passion for writing, books, and education. She’s also the author of five published novels and teaches live and online courses and workshops for writers.

The Informal Chat:

I can still remember sitting in my great-aunt Frances’s lap while she read to me from books like The Poky Little Puppy and The Cow Went Over the Mountain. It was magic, that feeling of entering another world, of watching the characters come to life in my mind. By the time I was eight, I knew I wanted to be a teacher–and a writer.

Even before I could maneuver a fat first-grade pencil, my great-aunt Augusta and I made our own stories by cutting out characters from catalogs and acting out adventures with them. My grandmother and I filled her car with imaginary animals. I can still remember how I had to hold tightly to the sea turtle whenever we crossed the Kanawha River bridge. Those wonderful ladies filled my life with puppets and flannel board characters, sea monkeys, and growing crystals. And books, books, always books. They understood the truth of Aristotle’s words: “Education is not the filling of a vessel, but the kindling of a fire.”

I got a B.S. and later a Masters in Special Education, taught for 11 years in a comprehensive development classroom and one in a junior high/high school resource class. Eventually, I left the classroom, worked in educational assessment, and finally became a writer, but I never lost the joy of learning or the passion for sharing that joy. One of my most rewarding days was when a student came to me after we had read The Outsiders and he had watched the movie. “That was a pretty good movie, Ms. Beth,” he said. “But the book was better.”