Mattie Quesenberry Smith grew up in Blacksburg, but none of her relatives had gone to college. Her dad was a carpenter, her mother a homemaker with an interest in poetry.
“She became very interested in the coffee houses and the artist scene in Paris -- that sort of thing,” Smith recalls.
The family often went fishing or hunting, and Mattie was intrigued by the natural world, so it made sense that she began her studies at Hollins University, majoring in biology. Then she discovered a passion for writing and decided to be a double major in biology and English literature. Poetry, in particular, intrigued her.
“When I wrote a poem, it was pulling together these tendrils from what I heard, saw, tasted, felt, intuited in that particular place, and I have always been super fascinated with the fact that this is all somehow conjoined in one person’s expression.”
She went on to get a master’s degree – her studies neatly melding a love of literature and physics.

“My honors thesis at Hollins really addressed the second law of thermodynamics and the uncertainty principle and also chaos theory and how Thomas Pynchon used those in his novels.”
She landed jobs teaching at Mountain Gateway and Blue Ridge Community College, then joined the faculty at the Virginia Military Institute. While her courses focused on practical rhetoric for writing and research, she was surprised by how creative her students could be.
"I do offer, on Mondays, 15 minutes of free time for them to write whatever they want to," she explains. "A couple of students wrote beautiful poems. The stronger poets, sometimes, are the engineering students, because they’re a lot more interested in thinking about detail, and a lot of the students at VMI wear their hearts on their sleeves."
One of her students – a guy she says was super smart --challenged her instruction and was outspoken about the literature they were studying in class. He reminded her of certain birds that are constantly speaking up and inspired a poem called Piebald Jack.
If Piebald Jack is every teacher's favorite,
It is because he talks back.
In this voice is the blue jay that first says it back,
pert in his noticeable blue-black jacket.
And the pileated woodpecker will beat it out,
A headstrong monotony reverberating,
Even in his red-crested head.
The crow, too, will call the rascal out,
Talking to the owl in the white pine and the hawk in the hemlock.
Both are here for the kill, and but for the jay,
The woodpecker and the crow, who could tell it?
They echo cacaphony throughout the woods,
and the classroom forest sits up to listen,
discerning the shortfall between light and shadow.
Smith was surprised when – while teaching a class -- she got a call from the governor’s office – an administrator asking if she would accept an unpaid position.
"She said something like, ‘Would you be willing to represent the commonwealth as poet laureate?' Smith recalls. "And I said, ‘What exactly does that entail?’ and she said, ‘Really, you can shape it the way you want to.’"
That was an appealing offer, as Smith would like to share poetry with people from many walks of life.
"Veterans who are poets, people who have food or housing insecurity and my final, of course, is science."
She thinks, for example, that it would be great to have a poetry contest and post the winners at local food banks, so people could read them while waiting in line.
And she’ll remain busy with teaching and writing of her own. Smith recently got her PhD from Virginia Tech and has a stack of notes on her desk – each containing the starting line of a poem she intends to write when time permits.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.