Originally from Port Huron, Terry McMillan, with her phenomenal New York Times bestseller Waiting to Exhale, has become one of the most important American novelists writing today.

Terry McMillan received her B.A. in Journalism from the University of California at Berkeley, and attended the MFA Film Program at Columbia University. Macmillan's first novel, Mama, published in 1987, received a National Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation. She has been awarded a 1988 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in literature, a 1986 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the Doubleday/Columbia University Literary Fellowship. She was a three-time fellow at Yaddo Artist Colony and The MacDowell Colony. She has been a Visiting Professor of English at the University of Wyoming and Stanford