Terry H. Stickels

Author and speaker, Terry Stickels, has dedicated his life to the pursuit of improving one’s mental flexibility and creative problem solving skills… and making it fun. His books, calendars, card decks and newspaper columns are filled with fun and challenging puzzles that stretch the minds of even the best thinkers.

Stickels is well-known for his three internationally syndicated columns: Frame Games, seen in USA Weekend magazine, is read by over 48,000,000 people in 600 newspapers weekly. He concurrently writes Stickelers (sic), a puzzle column syndicated daily by King Features, appearing in some of the largest newspapers in America such as the New York Daily News, the Chicago-Sun Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, to name a few. He also writes the Stickdoku column for the USA Weekend magazine.

Stickels still finds time to create his yearly calendar as well as books for both kids and adults. You may see his puzzles on the back of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran or on a Universal Studios website featuring a movie such as Beautiful Mind, where he created the most famous IQ quiz in internet history. This was followed by three successful books requested by the high I.Q. society Mensa.

Not only in demand in the publishing world, Stickels is sought after as a public speaker. His keynote addresses are fast paced, humorous looks at the ability (and sometimes lack thereof) to think clearly. Using puzzles as mental warm-ups, he immediately engages the audience into interactive fun where he guides them to self-discovery of the power of their minds. It doesn’t take long before it becomes clear that it isn’t as difficult as one may have guessed to augment these powers…and maybe have a little fun doing it.

Born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, Stickels created his first puzzle at age 11. He and friend Tom Pyper, now a well known attorney, were looking for something to do one summer after their little league baseball games were continually rained out. Pyper's mother handed the boys a puzzle book and Stickels was hooked on logical thinking and a lifelong pursuit of having fun with puzzles.

He attended the University of Nebraska at Omaha on a football scholarship and graduated with a major in geography and minor in natural sciences. It was while tutoring students in math and physics at UNO that he saw the advantages of using puzzles to assist the students in understanding certain concepts in these disciplines. Puzzles offered the perfect non-intimidating approach in aiding students to become better thinkers.

After years of creating puzzles, Stickels was asked to write a weekly puzzle column for a 12-newspaper syndicate in Rochester, New York. After two years, his puzzles caught the eye of Sterling Publishing in New York and his first book, Mindstretching Puzzles, became an immediate hit and is still selling well to this day. This book was followed by 10 more puzzle books all dedicated to having fun exploring the powers of the mind. His popular FrameGames puzzles are still featured on kid’s television shows in Upstate New York. New York Times’ crossword editor Will Shortz’s uses some of Stickels’ more mathematical puzzles on his popular Weekend Edition radio show heard weekly on National Public Radio.

Not only are Stickels’ books used for fun worldwide, such austere bodies as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics praise his books as important aids in assisting students in learning how to think critically.

Stickels currently lives and puzzles in Fort Worth, Texas.

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