Terri Jentz photo

Terri Jentz

Terri Jentz (born 1957) is an American writer. She wrote Strange Piece of Paradise, about the attack she and a college friend from Yale University suffered in Cline Falls State Park (in Oregon) in 1977, while on a cross-country bicycle and camping trip and how she, after 15 years, returned to Oregon to investigate the attack and come to terms with the experience. The New York Times in its Sunday book review wrote, "Imagine that it had been Truman Capote himself who'd been savaged in Holcomb, Kan., and that he had survived to describe his ordeal. That is the level of command and sinew at work in the writing."

Strange Piece of Paradise was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year.

Jentz's partner is film director Donna Deitch.


“I believe that you meet people who are vital to your transformation only when the conditions are right, when the tenacious concerns of the unconscious break into awareness. Then such kindred spirits are drawn to each other like iron shavings to a magnet.”
Terri Jentz
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