After earning his master's degree, Terrell worked as a fact checker for
The New York Observer. From 1996 to 2001, Terrell taught at
Rockhurst University in Kansas City and became the Writer in Residence from 2000 to 2003. His first novel,
The Huntsman, was published in 2001. The novel centers on a young African American who elbows his way into Kansas City's white, upper-class society while searching for answers about his family's past. The
New York Times chose it as a notable book and
The Kansas City Star and the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch selected it as a best book of 2001. In 2005, Terrell published his second novel,
The King of Kings County. This book elaborated on the relationship between real estate and race in Kansas City, tracing the life of an ambitious developer who uses
racial covenants to build a segregated suburban empire. The book won the
William Rockhill Nelson award and was named a best book of 2005 by
The Christian Science Monitor. In 2006, Terrell was named to a list of best writers under 40 by a panel of
National Book Critics Circle Award members. In 2006 and 2010, Terrell embedded with the U.S. Army in Iraq. He covered the war for
The Washington Post Magazine,
Slate and NPR. Terrell was the Hodder Fellow at
Princeton University for 2008–2009 and a visiting lecturer in 2011. He was the
New Letters Writer-in-Residence at the University of Missouri-Kansas City from 2004 to 2014. In 2014, he became an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at UMKC. In 2018, he was promoted to Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UMKC. Terrell's third book,
The Good Lieutenant: A Novel, was published in June 2016 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The novel is told in reverse order, following Lieutenant Emma Fowler as she leads a platoon of male soldiers through tragedy and suspicious circumstances during America's war in Iraq.
The Boston Globe and
The Washington Post selected the novel as a best book of 2016. Since 2017, he has co-hosted the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast with novelist
V.V. Ganeshananthan. The podcast is presented by
Literary Hub and covers the intersection of literature and the news. ==Selected bibliography==