Terry McMillan
1951
Terry McMillan is an African American short fiction author and novelist who believes her work is best described as the experiences of African American men and women from the city. McMillan was born to blue-collar worker Edward Lewis McMillan in Port Huron Michigan in 1951. Her father was an alcoholic that beat up his wife regularly and this left a huge scar on the young Terry. When she was only thirteen, her parents divorced and her mother had to work several odd jobs to feed her children. At sixteen, Terry got a job at the local library stacking shelves to help her mother provide for her siblings. It was while she was working at the library that she became a voracious reader and learned about the world of imagination. She loved the works of the likes of Thomas Mann, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. But since most of the works she read were by white authors, she was surprised to find that there were also black authors such as James Baldwin and Langston Hughes that wrote good books.