Terri Laxton Brooks

Terri Laxton Brooks, author, academic and widely journalist for national publications, was born in poverty in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, a small town surrounded by cornfields. Her early efforts at reporting were in high school, where, with her typing teacher’s permission, she created a student newspaper and cajoled friends into distribution.

Her most recent book is the highly praised On Loneliness: How To Feel Less Alone In An Isolating world. On Amazon and in bookstores.

The first in her family to go to college, she attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison with money from tips saved from waitressing—first, at the age of thirteen, in the Reedsburg Coffee Shop; and then, in college, during summer and winter vacations in the nearby village of Rock Springs (pop. today 362).

There, at a dusty crossroads, the Behnke family owned and ran a popular family restaurant and bar that drew nearby farmers and townsfolk, and tourists from nearby Wisconsin Dells. As they were closing each night, the Behnkes gave her food to take home to her struggling family.

During those years of waitressing, she wrote profiles of the local country customers to whom she served deep-fried trout from nearby streams, beef slaughtered up the road, and hand-cut fries from the potato patch.

While in college, she spent her Junior Year Abroad at the Université d’Aix-en-Provence and still speaks French with an accent Provençal.

After college she shocked her mother by leaving Wisconsin for Illinois, where she had a job waiting for her at the Chicago Tribune. Terri covered local news and wrote a popular column called Our Town. She was on the team that won a Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for its coverage of vote fraud.

While she loved her job and the freedom the paper gave her, sexism in the newsroom was rife, including daily lewd comments about female reporters’ body parts. The most prominent photo on newsroom walls was Playboy’s current nude “playmate of the month.”

When Terri playfully took it down one night and posted in its place Cosmopolitan magazine’s nude photo of Burt Reynolds on a bear rug, a senior editor came down from his high office to her desk to warn her personally that if she did it again she would be fired. She ultimately quit and filed a suit with the State of Illinois for sexual harassment and discrimination, which she won.

Her marriage to her childhood sweetheart was drifting into divorce when she left Chicago and moved to New York City. From her two-room apartment on West 12th Street in Greenwich Village, she wrote and published her first nonfiction books as well as articles for national magazines. Her early work was published under the name Terri Schultz.

When New York University invited her to teach in the Department of Journalism (now the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute) she planned to stay one semester but stayed 19 years. At NYU she received tenure and became Department Chair.

During that time, she remarried and gave birth to her son Brian. She also received a masters’ degree from the Great Books program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, studying Plato, Aristotle, and other Greats. (Her son, three years old at the time, told her years later he thought at the time she was going to school to study Play-Doh.) For her valedictorian speech, she compared the reporting of Herodotus—widely recognized as the first journalist—with journalism of today.

After nearly two decades at her beloved NYU, she accepted the position of Dean of the School of Communications (now the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communication) at Penn State University. The School, under the umbrella of the College of Liberal Arts at that time, was declining in student enrollment, struggling financially, rife with discrimination against women faculty and Black students, and on the verge of losing accreditation.

To turn it around, she successfully lobbied the Faculty Senate to allow the school to become its own independent College, developed, with senior faculty, written standards for tenure, and formed a Board of Advisors of prominent alumni, journalists, and other leaders in media. The changes led to dramatic growth in national standing, fundraising, enrollment, student diversity, and faculty research.

Terri was one of the founders of The National Writer’s Union and an early leader in PEN, advocating for authors’ rights in publishing contracts, and freedom of expression. She received a Fulbright to study the press in India and later served for six years on the Fulbright Committee. For four years she was a United Nations representative for Solar Cookers International.

Her most recent day jobs to support her writing habit were Capital Campaign Communications Director for NYU Langone Health and, subsequently, for Weill Cornell Medical Center.