Statement of Professional Development

When I first started teaching at Dalton State College, no one knew I was a nationally published poet. Because the college is primarily a business college, there wasn’t too much opportunity or incentive to build up my professional poetry and fiction credentials. However, my own inner drive and passion for writing eventually engaged me in the college literary magazine, Tributaries. I joined and became a regular participant of the Chattanooga Writers Guild. I started teaching a one-hour creative writing course for beginning writers. A new three-hour course, Writing Creatively for Self-Enhancement will be offered for the first time during spring 2006. Most importantly, I found myself writing again, with all that that word connotes--revising, pulling together collections of my work, and submitting material for publication.

This past year, I was approached by an editor who wanted permission to use my poem “Grasshopper” in an Internet teaching anthology that would be used not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, and Canada. The poem had been published in The Ohio Journal in 1982 and in 1984 reprinted in Anthology of Modern Verse. Because writers always say that getting into the teaching anthologies furthers one’s career more than anything else, except maybe Oprah, I was thrilled to have my poem published in Heydays of Our Lives (www.heydays.ws).

In addition, I have been writing a novel, Flight, which is a story about a seventeen-year-old girl who kills her father. Because her mother is arrested for the crime, the girl must grow up fast. She has important decisions to make.

Another major book project, in which I am engaged, along with Professor Roschelle Mears, is Changing Lives: Reaching for the American Dream. The focus of this Creative Nonfiction is to share heartfelt stories of immigrants who now live in Dalton, Georgia.

Dr. Mathews is a member of Associated Writers Program, National Council of Teachers of English, American Association for University Women, Georgia Writers Association, and Chattanooga Writers’ Guild.

2003-4 Monthly Participant Chattanooga Writer’s Guild

10/04 Presenter “Novel Beginnings” Chattanooga Writers Guild, Chattanooga

3/31/04 Presenter “Snapshots: Stories of Local Immigrants”

DSC Brown Bag Series

2/04 Presenter “Four Love Poems by Marsha Mathews” and Interview. WUTC 88.9 FM radio, Chattanooga.

4/04 Presenter “Climbing the Uxmal Ruins” at Professor Roschelle Mears’s lecture on Mexico,

DSC Brown Bag Series

2/19-21/04 Attendant Meacham’s Writers’ Workshop, UTC and Chattanooga State.

2004 Coordinator Teaching Roundtable for Literature

2003 Attendant Seventh Annual Blue Ridge Writer’s Conference

2003 Coordinator Teaching Roundtable for Writing about Lit

2002 Attendant National Council of Teachers of English Conference, Atlanta

2002 Presenter “How to Write Poetry,” with Visiting Professor Dr. Andrew Salmon,

Dalton State College Student Center

2002 Attendant Bourne Lecture Series

2002 Attendant Using Eudora Email Workshop

2002 Attendant Front Page XP Workshop

2002 Attendant Cultural Diversity Workshop,

Roberts Library, Dalton State College

10/01 Attendant OCIS Adobe Photoshop

8/01 Participant “As Corpses, Let’s Go Walking: A Study of

Gallows Humor and Disappearing in

Heller’s Catch-22 and Salinger’s Catcher in

the Rye.” Presented at University of

Maryland World Humor & Irony Conference, 2001.

7/01 Participant “Appalachian Voices.” Original Poetry. Presented at the 24^th Annual Appalachian Writer’s Workshop, Hindman Settlement

School, Hindman, KY, 2001.