ABOUT MATHINA
I'm a writer, developmental editor, and writing teacher in Alexandria, Virginia.
My work has appeared in Longreads, Outside, the Rumpus, Creative Nonfiction, Cagibi, Wall Street Journal, Brevity, Deep Wild, Off Assignment, and HuffPost, and Jane Friedman has run several of my craft essays. I have an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College and have attended Bread Loaf and Yale writers' workshops.
In 2016, I quit my day job and backpacked along the Appalachian Trail for 675 miles (blogging about it at the Trek under my trail name, Notebook). My current work in progress is a literary novel set on the AT.
I've been teaching writing for more than twenty years — at Politics and Prose, the Smithsonian, writing festivals; and in college classrooms. Before that I was a newspaper reporter and then an elementary school teacher, which is how I ended up spending fifteen-plus years developing educational assessments. My most recent day job was as a speechwriter in the Civil Rights Division at the (Biden) Department of Justice.
I work with fiction and narrative nonfiction writers who are serious about craft.
When I'm not writing, I'm renovating the house, throwing salsa parties, or singing karaoke badly.
TODAY featured me in a "Love Your Age" segment.