Clint J. Terrell graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English with high honors distinction. Clint also holds an Associate of Arts degree in Spanish with high honors distinction from Cabrillo College. He has studied internationally at the Center for Investigation of Decolonial Dialogues in Catalunya, Ollin Tlahtoalli Centro de Lenguas y Cultura Mexicana, and La Gaurida Escuela Cooperativa de Español y Espacio Cultural in Oaxaca, Mexico. 
At Berkeley, he was active in the Underground Scholars Initiative—a student organization composed of formerly incarcerated students that emerged out of the movement to abolish solitary confinement and the Pelican Bay Hunger Strikes of 2013. As an English major, Clint became interested in the study of American captivity narratives, classic slave narratives, and contemporary U.S. prison narratives. He wrote his honors thesis, “From the Talking Book to the Talking Prison: Black Political Thought and Signifying Continuities in Jimmy Baca’s Prison Narrative,” which interrogates models of resistance through literacy, a reoccurring trope in literatures of confinement. This research was published in the Berkeley McNair Research Journal, and he was able to draw on this research for two additional publications: “Jimmy Santiago Baca and Latina/o Prison Literature: A Quest for Language, Land, and Reconciliation" in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latina/o Literature (2018) and “Can the Panthers Still Save Us? Street Actions, Non-Profit Factions, and the Non-Movement Against State Violence” in the St. Anthony’s International Review (2021). 
As a fourth-year English Ph.D. student at UCSB, Clint is continuing to develop a critical carceral studies research agenda within a literary context. He is especially interested in how themes of redemption in U.S. prison literature are increasingly shaped by the specter of nationalism—civic, cultural, and revolutionary nationalisms. Specifically, he questions how the triumph of cultural nationalism as the dominant form of resistance in the U.S. prison system continues to produce esoteric redemption tropes that obstruct counter-hegemonic theories of freedom from developing in the genre. For this research project, Clint was selected as a recipient of the 2021 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. 
Currently, Clint is working as a research assistant for the Global Latinidades Project in collaboration with the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy in San Jose, California. With these two institutions, Clint is organizing a summer research seminar at the Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca, Mexico which will take place in the Autumn of 2022. He also conducted archival research on 1960s and 1970s California prisoner journals and newspapers, new trajectories in U.S. prisoner writing, Latinx volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, and bibliographic research for the planned Luis Rodriguez Reader.