The Woman in the Well: And Other Ancestories

Marcia Smith had a long career as an award-winning journalist for newspapers and other periodicals, beginning in college as the news editor for the University Daily at Texas Tech University with later stints at the Huntsville (AL) News and Phoenix Today News. For a dozen years she was a columnist and feature writer at the Dallas Times Herald, as well as a contributor to People, Leisure, and Life magazines, among others. Seeking to nurture her interests in women's issues and cultural history, she enrolled in graduate studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she received a Master of Arts in the Humanities, with a thesis that focused on the depiction of women's illness in 19th-century popular literature. From there it was a natural step to teaching journalism and literature at Dallas's Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts from 1992 to 2005. The biographical vignettes that make up this collection are a perfect marriage of her experience as a writer and researcher and of her interests in the lives of ordinary men and women in the distant past. While all the subjects in these essays have a familial connection near or distant to her, she has recently branched out to explore the lives of Dallas's early citizens buried in the historic Oakland Cemetery.