Terry Ballantine Bisson (born February 12, 1942, Owensboro, Kentucky) is an American science fiction and fantasy author best known for his short stories. Several of his works, including "Bears Discover Fire", have won top awards in the science fiction community, such as the Hugo and the Nebula.
After attending Grinnell College, Bisson graduated from the University of Louisville in 1964. He lived "on and off" in New York City for most of the next four decades, moving to Oakland, California in 2002. He became a "working" writer in 1981. A self-identified member of the New Left, he operated Jacobin Books, a "revolutionary" mail-order book service, from 1985 to 1990, in partnership with Judy Jensen.
Bisson has been married three times. He and his first wife, Deirdre Holst, have three children. His second marriage was to Mary Corey. Bisson married his "longtime companion" Judy Jensen on December 24, 2004; the couple has one daughter, and Bisson acts as stepfather to Jensen's two children.
In the 1960s, early in his career, Bisson collaborated on several comic book stories with Clark Dimond, and he edited Major Publications' black-and-white horror-comics magazine Web of Horror, leaving before the fourth issue.
In 1996, he wrote two three-part comic book adaptations of Nine Princes in Amber and The Guns of Avalon, the first two books in Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series. A year later, Bisson also finished the writing of Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman sequel to the classic A Canticle for Leibowitz.