Teri Merlyn has a diverse career background, working for twenty years as a freelancer and small business owner in costume, designer label fashion and haute couture. She then persued an academic path in Theatre, Psychology and Sociology, a Grad.Dip.Cont.Ed and M.Phil in Arts Education, and a PhD thesis on radical literary history: Writing revolution: The British radical literary tradition as the seminal force in the development of adult education, its Australian context and the life and work of the postwar communist writer, Eric Lambert (Adult Education, Griffith University, 2004).
 

She is the maternal niece of Eric Lambert, an acclaimed Australian writer of the 1950s and 60s, best known for the WWII classic, The Twenty Thousand Thieves (1951). Teri has a solid academic publications list in national and international journals, two of which won awards. For four years she wrote a monthly current affairs opinion column for the Brisbane anarchist-run paper, West End Neighbourhood News (2000-2004), and four feature articles in the Northern Beaches paper, Manly Daily. She has recently won small awards for her poetry with the online site ScribblyGum and has two poems in the coming November issue of the literary magazine, Positive Words.