Student Profile
Vitals:
Name: Terry Dugan
Graduation Year: 2010
Hometown: Ohio
Major: English
Weekend Activity: Writing
Terry came to the Masters of Writing program at Manhattanville seeking a way to creatively express her experiences working as a researcher in the Pediatric Aids Unit at Bellevue Hospital. In a course she took in Spring 2005, she found her voice in a genre she had never before explored -- poetry.
Terry began work on her poemTosca Kisses the AIDS Ward, in Linda Simone’s poetry class. It was this poem that won first place for poetry in the “Unfinished Works: Art for AIDS” contest, sponsored by the AIDS Services Foundation of Orange County, Calif., and was published in the anthology, Unfinished Works (2005). This was also the poem that Terry read at the United Nations Visions and Millennium Development Goals Speak through the Arts” program. (Teacher Linda Simone was also represented by her poetry.)
Since then, Terry has enjoyed other successes: her poem Body Fluids received honorable mention in the 34th Annual Greenburgh Poetry Contest. Her poem Re: Search recently won third place among emerging poets in the Being at Work Poetry Challenge, sponsored by the Canadian Living Work Foundation. An essay, begun in her Creative Nonfiction course on the topic of unethical clinical trials in Africa as portrayed in the movie The Constant Gardner, will be published in the anthology, Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Literary and Artistic Views of AIDS. Several of her non-AIDS poems were published in literary journals. Presently, Terry is hard at work on a poetry chapbook about the Pediatric AIDS Unit and hopes to obtain an artist residency to complete the project.