Having successfully defended her dissertation, “The Nature and Perceptions of Critical Reflective Writing within Hands-On Technology and Engineering Design-Based Learning,” Mattie Quesenberry Smith has earned a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI & SU) with a concentration in cross-disciplinary, integrative approaches to teaching writing and technology and engineering design-based learning. Smith graduated from VPI & SU in December 2024. Recently inducted into Phi Kappa Phi, an interdisciplinary honor society, Smith focuses on the influences of science and technology on the poetic voice, and she explores the intersections between science, technology, engineering, math, writing, and metaphor-making.
Since 2013, Smith has been teaching first-year writing and rhetoric classes at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), in Lexington, Virginia, where she also serves as Vice President of the Rockbridge Shenandoah Chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA). For several years, Smith also taught at Blue Ridge Community College (BRCC) in Weyer’s Cave, Virginia, and Mountain Gateway Community College (MGCC) in Clifton Forge, Virginia, as an instructor for several levels of developmental reading and writing, freshman composition, freshman English Literature, American Literature 1 & 2, and professional writing in support of the nursing, welding, and other workforce programs. During her tenure in the community college system, several of her community college students received student writing awards from the Virginia Outdoor Writers Association and performed public readings.
As a community facilitator, Smith has mentored local writers in Rockbridge County, Virginia, by organizing Sub Terra, a local creative writing workshop. For several years, she coordinated Writers at Studio Eleven, first within Fine Arts in Rockbridge (FAIR), and then through a collaboration with Professor Lesley Wheeler at Washington and Lee University (WLU). This reading series attracted a diverse audience for writers from various communities and creative genres—professional, student, academic, and local creative writers of all ages.
Smith has written in various professional, academic, and local capacities throughout the years, including serving as a legislative assistant for the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee and ghost writer for a United States Congressman, writing articles, and creating press and public relations materials. She was also edited the poetry page editor for Conservative Review and reviewed books for the Hollins Critic.
Smith writes in several creative genres, including screenplays, memoirs, short personal essays, and poems. Finishing Line Press nominated Smith’s chapbook, Mother Chaos: Under Electric Light, for a Library of Virginia Literary Award, and Ruminate nominated her poem “To a Fishing Father” for a Pushcart Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in literary magazines, such as Diagram, Dappled Things, Southern Poetry Review, Timberline Review, Floyd County Moonshine, Red Earth Review, Avatar, and Forum, a monthly magazine published by Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. Several of her poems have been highlighted recently online in Poetry with Mathematics, New Verse Review, and Poetry X Hunger. Several anthologies have included her poems, such as We Are Residents Here, which borrows its title from Smith’s poem, “We Are All Residents Here,” What Lies beyond the Frame, and Tupelo Press’s Thirty Days.
As a screenwriter, Smith shares numerous awards with her husband, Douglas N. Smith, for their documentary film, Between Two Fires, and screenplay, Once to Every Man—including a CINE Golden Eagle, the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival’s Best Documentary of the Show, and a finalist award in the Virginia Governor’s Screenplay Contest. Interested in the impact of natural events on the history of humankind, she is contributing to a feature film project and related graphic novel series adapted from Eagle in the Snow, a novel written by Wallace Breem and set on the Rhine River, 406 A.D., when barbarians crossed that frozen river on New Year’s Eve to catalyze the fall of Rome. The Smiths are also collaborating to pitch Eagle in the Snow as a multi-platform project, including a feature film.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, with a double major in biology and English literature, Smith was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa and awarded several creative writing and science awards for honors work in both majors. She also earned an MA from Hollins University in creative writing with a concentration in poetry. At Hollins University, she studied poetry with Professors Rosanne Coggeshall, Cathy Hankla, Jeanne Larsen, Richard H. W. Dillard, and Eric Trethewey.
Smith was born in Radford, Virginia, and she grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia. She is a first generation college student, Appalachian-born and bred. She grew up hiking, fishing, and trapping in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was not a rare occasion when she went out on school nights to run trotlines and catfish the New River with her family. Today, she lives at the foot of Little House Mountain in Lexington, Virginia, with her husband, often visited by their ten children, in-laws, and a host of dogs.
Poet Laureate of Virginia 