Terri Laxton Brooks

Terri, a nonfiction author, journalist and academic, writes about the impact of social, cultural and political events on our personal lives.

BOOKS

Bittersweet: Surviving And Growing From Loneliness

1st edition 1976 (HarperCollins. Republished as a Penguin Classic. Under prior pen name Terri Schultz.) Book of the Month Club Alternate.

2nd edition: Forthcoming
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Praise for 1st edition:

If you read only one book this year, let it be Bittersweet. It just may change your life. Gloria Vanderbilt

Amazon Reader Reviews
1.…Reading it was a transcendent experience that gave me what I believe was my first awareness of the strength and beauty of self-connection and the joy of solitude.

2. This is, bar none, my favorite book in the world… If I were on a desert island, this is one book I would hope to have at my side…. It's not a novel, but a treatise on loneliness. Sounds dreary but, trust me, it's extraordinary. It'll warm your heart.

Boomerang Baby

When the first of the Baby Boomers struggles to change as the world changes around her, it leads to a tumultuous journey that impacts three generations—from the 1940s to the 1990s.
Forthcoming

Words’ Worth: Write Well And Prosper

1st edition 1984 (St. Martin’s Press.) 2nd edition, 2010, with Mary Quigley. (Waveland Press.)

After teaching journalism and feature writing to NYU students for 18 years, Professor Brooks crafted this precise guide to writing. It furnishes both experienced and new writers with a map to the world of reporting and writing for print and the Web, with well-crafted exercises to hone skills, and savvy advice to help writers enrich their style and make their work more marketable. An invaluable guide that picks up where Strunk & White’s Elements of Style leaves off.

Women Can Wait: The Pleasures Of Motherhood After 30

1979 (Doubleday/Dolphin. Under prior pen name Terri Schultz.)
Through in-depth interviews, several dozen women reveal their most intimate thoughts, wishes and decisions about when and whether to have children.

Recommended by Goodreads:
Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Start by marking “Women Can Wait: The Pleasures Of Motherhood After 30” as Want to Read.
JOURNALISM
While a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Terri was hired as a reporter and columnist for the Metro section of the Chicago Tribune upon graduation, where she eventually became part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism. Sex discrimination at the paper was rampant, however, and she later quit and filed state and EEOC complaints about inequities of promotion of women to the newsroom and of assignments once there.

As a freelancer in Chicago and New York, Terri published around 100 articles for The New York Times, Harper's, Columbia Journalism Review, Ladies Home Journal , Cosmopolitan, Penthouse, and others.

Dedicated to promoting the rights of writers, in the 1980s Terri was an early chair of the organizing committee for the National Writers' Union. She also chaired the PEN committee that created national standards for authors' access to information from book publishers.

Terri is founder, curator and editor of Witness To War, a web archive of untold stories from more than 100 eyewitnesses to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. She hopes to publish in 2021, the 20th anniversary of the attack.

ACADEMIA
For nearly two decades, Terri served as journalism professor and then chair of the department of journalism at NYU (now the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute), and then as dean of the college of communications at Penn State (now the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications), which grew in size and national reputation under her leadership. Terri received a Fulbright to India to study the role of the press in a multilingual, multiethnic society, and served from 2002-2006 on the Fulbright board.

In her most recent full-time positions, Terri was communications director for the capital campaign offices of two NYC academic medical centers: NYU Langone Medical Center and, subsequently , Weill Cornell Medical Center, helping their teams raise a total of more than three billion dollars to build new basic and translational research facilities and support scientists in their work.