Terry Ann Thaxton’s two books of poetry are Getaway Girl (2011) and The Terrible Wife (2013), both from Salt Publishing. Creative Writing in the Community: A Guide is forthcoming from Bloombury (2013). Her essay “Delusions of Grandeur” won the 2012 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize at the Missouri Review. She has published in Rattle, Connecticut Review, Hayden’s Ferry, Teaching Artist Journal, West Branch, Tampa Review, and others. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Florida. She is fourth generation Floridian—the state that should be renamed Defunct. She seldom worries about any defunctness coming to her own life because every day something happens in “Defunct Florida” that makes her own life seem like paradise. Recent happenings in the State of Defunct include a man who went bowling with a loaded pistol in his pocket and shot himself in the leg, a 100-acre sinkhole swallowing a Disney World resort, one naked man chewing off the face of another naked man, and her neighbor mowing his lawn with a t-shirt cut off just below his nipples.
