Terri Bailey WriteS
Black Southern storytelling rooted in memory, survival, spirituality, and speculative imagination.
Terri L. Bailey is a writer, poet, spoken word artist, and cultural preservationist whose work explores Black womanhood, memory, spirituality, healing, survival, and the evolving stories of historically Black communities. Her writing spans poetry, speculative fiction, Black Southern horror, oral history, and creative nonfiction rooted in lived experience and collective memory.
FEATURED ACHIEVEMENTS
Author: Gainesville Proper 2025
Imagining America Randy Martin Spirit Award
University of Florida Arts in Health Intensive 2024
SPARC352 Community Art Grant Recipient 2024
Bronze Student Telly Award for Mini Doc: When the Music Was Cheap and Damn Near Free 2025
International Women’s Writing Guild Board Member 2024-current
Founder of Bailey Learning and Arts Collective (BLAAC) Community Arts & Education Organization 2019
Runner-Up, Alachua County Inagural Poet Laureate
“Words are my greatest love. I am an avid reader, writer, and storyteller. Writing saved my life, and I’m committed to teaching others its value in transformation.”
Writing as Healing & Cultural Memory
For Terri Bailey, writing is more than creative expression. It is documentation, resistance, remembrance, and healing. Through storytelling, poetry, workshops, and community-centered creative practice, her work preserves voices, histories, spiritual traditions, and lived experiences that are too often erased or overlooked.
Influenced by Black feminist thought, oral storytelling traditions, Southern memory work, and speculative imagination, Terri’s work creates space for reflection, survival, truth-telling, and transformation.
Selected Projects & Creative Work
A cultural storytelling and preservation project documenting the memories, voices, traditions, and evolving history of Gainesville’s historic Black communities. This collection includes poetry from Terri L. Bailey and illustrations by Muralist, Turbado Marabou, both natives of Gainesville, Florida’s oldest historically Black neighborhood, the Pleasant Street District.
GAINESVILLE PROPER
Workshops and facilitated creative spaces using storytelling, reflection, poetry, and expressive writing as tools for healing, empowerment, and self-discovery. Rooted in community care, creative wellness practices, and Black feminist traditions, these experiences encourage participants to reconnect with their voices, honor their lived experiences, and explore new possibilities for personal and collective transformation. Workshops can be tailored for community organizations, schools, universities, wellness spaces, conferences, retreats, and intergenerational groups seeking meaningful, culturally grounded engagement.
Writing to heal
Speculative Fiction & Black Horror
Fiction exploring spirituality, survival, ancestral memory, transformation, and the unseen realities carried within Black Southern life. My work blends folklore, speculative fiction, horror, and cultural memory to examine the sacred, the inherited, and the unspoken threads woven through Black communities across generations. My writing was featured at the University of Florida’s Achebe | Baldwin: Africa | America @40 symposium, an event honoring the historic meeting between James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe forty years earlier, where I shared original work and reflected on the lasting influence of their literary legacies. Through storytelling, I aim to preserve memory, confront erasure, and create narratives that are haunting, layered, spiritual, and deeply human.
From the Upcoming Work: For the Love of Mary
For the Love of Mary was born from a writing assignment nearly a decade ago, but Mary’s voice refused to stay on the page unfinished. Blending speculative fiction, spirituality, ancestral memory, and Black Southern storytelling, the novel explores survival, inheritance, womanhood, grief, and the unseen forces that shape the lives of Black women across generations. Rooted in the textures of Southern life and layered with mystery, the story moves between the sacred and the haunting, asking what we inherit, what we carry, and what refuses to be buried. Mary’s story does not simply ask to be told — it insists on being remembered.
Esperanza by Terri L. Bailey
Mary’s best friend, Carmelita, had made several predictions that came true. Most recently, she warned Mary that her new friend, Esperanza, had more than a platonic interest in Mary’s fiancé, Omar. Even Omar tried to tell Mary that the woman was interested in him. One night after a double date, he expressed his concern.
“Mary, I think Esperanza was trying to get with me. Did you see how she kept leaning in close and whispering in my ear? When you and her man went to dance, she was all over me. Maybe we should distance ourselves for a while.”
Mary laughed in his face and told him his ego and imagination was running wild.
“Have you seen her man? You are fine bae, but he is a young, strong brother with more money than you and I ever dreamed of. Besides, I like Esperanza. She’s fun and always gets us in VIP wherever we go. I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”
Soon after that conversation, Mary started having nightmares about Esperanza in which she would be standing over Mary, throwing blood on her, chanting some gibberish, and laughing wickedly while saying her name. In the final dream, Esperanza was in Mary’s bed, naked from the waist up with rows and rows of black beads draping between her breasts, moving up and down rhythmically to the deafening sound of her heartbeat. From the waist down, she was wearing a skirt of honeycombs dripping layers and layers of steaming hot honey. There was a white scarf tied in a big knot on the top of her head and she was smoking a fat ass cigar. Her eyes were black and fixed on Mary.
Continue the Journey
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Follow Terri Bailey’s ongoing work in storytelling, poetry, speculative fiction, workshops, cultural preservation, and creative healing.
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