About Terese...

Terese Woll is a Southern California native, born in West Covina and raised near San Diego. She studied Creative Writing and Literature at San Diego State University under the mentorship of Harold Jaffe, founder of Fiction International, earning her Master of Arts degree in Rhetoric and Creative Writing. Captivated by the literary style of ancient Middle Eastern writing in the Hebrew Bible, she embarked on a thirty-year exploration of biblical scrolls and the New Testament. 

The collection, Bible Haiku, was inspired by the ancient Japanese art form. "The words simply began tumbling out of my fingertips one day," she says. With her newly released companion volume, Bible Lyrics: Poems of Introspection and Breakthroughs, Terese presents readers with a collection of ballads, and free verse poems that are intimate and personal to her lived experience with faith and scripture. The first movement dares to imagine the Bible in conversation with itself - sacred texts that ponder their own meaning, and biblical figures who step forward to share their untold stories. The second movement illuminates modern struggles and celebrations; and how having an ancient biblical foundation informed her modern journey. These poems reveal how scripture continues to break through the noise of contemporary life, offering guidance, comfort, and profound insight. 

 The collection Side By Side: Free Verse Poems and Their Villanelle Companions emerges from a deepening fascination with the villanelle form. This collection presents pairs of poems side by side—the original free verse creations alongside their metamorphosis into the structured embrace of the villanelle.  The villanelle, with its intricate architecture of nineteen lines arranged in five tercets and a concluding quatrain, offers a beautiful challenge. Its distinctive pattern—where the first line returns in lines six, twelve, and eighteen, while the third line echoes in lines nine, fifteen, and nineteen—creates a mesmerizing dance of repetition and rhythm. Within these constraints, Terese sought to preserve the essential spirit of each free verse original while allowing new resonances to emerge through form.  Each pairing in this collection represents a journey of transformation. Like children born of the same heart but expressing themselves in different voices, these companion poems share DNA yet reveal distinct personalities. They are living creations, nurtured with care and released into the world with love. 

When she isn't writing, Terese can be found hiking the trails near her northern San Diego County home.