Terry Farish

Terry Farish is a writer of many different things – novels, picture books, and creative nonfiction.  She has written about people from many cultures who came as immigrants or refugees to the US. The Good Braider is her free verse novel about 17-year-old Viola and her family’s journey from war-torn Sudan to Portland, Maine.  She wrote The Good Braider after traveling to Kakuma Refugee Camp and years of collecting oral histories among southern Sudanese families in Portland. The novel was selected as a Best Book of the Year by the American Library Association.

Her picture book, Luis Paints the World, set in Lawrence, MA, is about a small boy whose brother is deployed in the US Army. It received awards from NCTE and Bank Street College of Education as a rare story about a child’s experience of a loved one’s deployment. But maybe the book people most remember is her picture book The Cat Who Liked Potato Soup, about a curmudgeonly old man and his cat “who he liked but not so’s you’d notice.”  

She is finishing up a novel told in two voices:  an American girl of Irish heritage and a Nepali boy born whose family was violently deported from Bhutan. It’s called Tales of Love and Flying Horses and is set in the fictional city of Mersea on New Hampshire’s Seacoast.
Terry is an itinerant yoga teacher and writing workshop presenter.  She teaches yoga at Gateway Taiji and Yoga in Portsmouth and for Yoga in Action, a nonprofit that seeks to bring yoga into communities of need.  

She’s going on a research trip to Vietnam in 2023. You can read about the journey on her blog-in-progress called “Letters to My Daughter:  Storytellers of the War.”

www.terryfarish.com/blog