Terese Marie
Mailhot
Terese Marie Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. Her work has appeared in Time, Mother Jones, The Guardian, and Best American Essays 2019. Mailhot is the New York Times bestselling author of Heart Berries, which was also a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, a Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. She lives in Indiana.
Award History
Jury Citation
"Heart Berries is a raw and riveting portrait of the artist as an Indigenous woman. Born to gifted, yet neglectful parents on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia, Mailhot chronicles her harsh childhood, ongoing battle with mental illness, and struggle against racist misrepresentation in the eyes of her white lover and the wider world. Terese Marie Mailhot’s devastating prose style draws upon the fearless, immediate oral tradition of her maternal ancestors. As she goes from embracing a narrative of Native dysfunction to telling her own story her own way, familiar definitions of femininity, motherhood, and even sanity need not apply. A wildly romantic, chillingly unsentimental, and completely unforgettable memoir."
— 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury (Michael Harris, Donna Bailey Nurse, and Joel Yanofsky)
