Meet Terri Phoenix

WUNC News | By Anita Rao,

Published January 4, 2016 at 12:00 PM EST

Terri Phoenix, the director of the LGBTQ Center at UNC-Chapel Hill.

This is a rebroadcast of a program that aired last year .

Terri Phoenix (T) grew up always feeling like an outsider. As a young child in a poor, fragmented family, Terri moved around more than 10 times before starting high school and was always the "new kid."

But then Terri's isolation got worse when T came out in a small, conservative town in south Georgia with no visible LGBTQ community. Terri ran away from home but survived by connecting with at least one person who accepted T.

Terri is now the director of the LGBTQ Center at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Host Frank Stasio talks to Terri about how being queer and transgender has shaped T's work to help other students and members of the UNC community.

Anita Rao

Anita Rao is the host and creator of "Embodied," a live, weekly radio show and seasonal podcast about sex, relationships & health. She's also the managing editor of WUNC's on-demand content. She has traveled the country recording interviews for the Peabody Award-winning StoryCorps production department, founded and launched a podcast about millennial feminism in the South, and served as the managing editor and regular host of "The State of Things," North Carolina Public Radio's flagship daily, live talk show. Anita was born in a small coal-mining town in Northeast England but spent most of her life growing up in Iowa and has a fond affection for the Midwest.

See stories by Anita Rao

Frank Stasio

Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.

See stories by Frank Stasio