Terri Jentz is a journalist, screenwriter and author of the acclaimed memoir Strange Piece of Paradise, a finalist in 2006 for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Award, and an Edgar Allan Poe Award in mystery writing. A blend of investigative journalism, memoir, detective story, travelogue, and philosophical meditation, the book is the story of Jentz's investigation into the unsolved attempted murder against her and her college roommate in the Oregon desert in 1977 -- a uniquely American story and also a universal inquiry into the nature of violence and trauma, community and social interconnection. . Her story was featured prominently in a PBS primetime documentary, Forgiveness, A Time to Love, A Time to Hate. Strange Piece of Paradise has garnered much attention in Europe has been translated into six languages She has adapted the book into a screenplay, for a feature-length film to be directed by Donna Deitch. For the last several years, Jentz has been writing a non-fiction book set in her homelands, the Dakotas in the American West – an excavation into the complexities of the land, and its people, both native and white -- in particular the area in and around the Standing Rock Reservation, coincidently, the site of the 2016 protest which drew indigenous tribes from all over the world. Jentz lives in Southern California with her partner Donna Deitch.
