Terri Schexnayder
Editor & Writing Tutor
Terri Schexnayder found her passion for writing when she was a young girl, creating neighborhood plays and short stories. She continued to communicate effectively through the written word during her 30-plus years in advertising, helping corporate, nonprofit and state clients. These included hundreds of press releases, speeches, educational training booklets, and even radio and TV copy while leading the very successful "Don't Mess with Texas" anti-litter campaign. She partners with adults to help edit and bring out their voice in manuscripts, essays and other nonfiction works. Her favorite writing moments are spent with her third through fifth grade creative writing students through tutoring and summer camp workshops. Schexnayder is a graduate of St. Edward's University, English Literature, Summa Cum Laude, and has recently published her first book, A Majestic History: 100 Years of the Paramount Theatre and is currently working on her second book featuring her 1970s memoirs from selling radio advertising in the iconic Austin of that time.
AREAS OF SPECIALTY
Fiction and general nonfiction for a wide audience
Working with young writers on academic writing, general nonfiction, and fiction
AVAILABLE FOR
Manuscript critiques and evaluations
Copyediting and proofreading
Private writing coaching/tutoring for young writers
"Ms. Schexnayder is the sole reason that the book in celebration of our theatre’s centennial, A Majestic History: 100 Years at the Paramount Theatre, was published in 2019. From the inception of the book project in 2013/14, she has astutely, skillfully and passionately led our team through ideation, conceptualization, extensive research, narrative creation and layout production. Throughout the process she exhibited a hyper-organized approach to managing both the literary development and the many individuals at the Paramount Theatre with whom she had to coordinate and communicate. At every step, Ms. Schexnayder provided all deliverables on time and on budget. Bluntly, she did a yeoman’s job of keeping our team focused and forward moving. We are all grateful for her deft touch.”
-Jim Ritts, CEO, Executive Director/The Paramount and State Theatres
"As a homeschool parents of 14 years, we appreciated how much care Terri put into helping our children's writing creativity to grow. Terri tutored two of our children once a week and both of our daughters gained a better confidence in writing with her help. They loved her visits, because Terri always went out of her way to make the lessons fun for them by using different creative learning ideas and techniques which they seemed to really enjoy.”
-Danielle G. (Austin, TX)
“Ms. Terri is a professional, passionate, and patient writing tutor. She tutored my daughter for a couple of years when she was in third and fourth grade which was very important time to build skills in different writing styles. Ms. Terri's weekly sessions usually focus on one topic each week and touch upon many types of writing. She often seeks feedbacks from parents to customize her lessons targeting the audience. My daughter was always excited about the writing classes not only because Ms. Terri brought interesting topics but also because she is such a fun teacher to work with. Ms. Terri helped her read more and broadened her horizon to many issues. Ms. Terri also uses her own writings and publications as examples. After Ms. Terri introduced her article in a local magazine, my daughter became super interested in submitting her essay into our neighborhood magazine. This article unveiled a diverse neighborhood which was published and highly appraised by the publisher. There are lots of other achievements my daughter accomplished after learning from Ms. Terri, such as getting into TAG Language Arts program and winning a writing contest. I was told by the LA teacher that my daughter was not good at creative writing. But Ms. Terri inspired her and turned her into a creative writer. “