Biography

W. Scott Smoot received his Master of Arts in Professional Writing at Kennesaw State University in 2001. In recent years, he has been a fellow of the National Writing Project at its Kennesaw Mountain site, serving as Chair of their Advisory Council for 2004-2005. Collaborating with others there, he has published essays in a book Writing America (Teacher's College Press, 2004) and in the journal Voices from the Middle. His play Her Yankee Secret was performed under his direction at The Walker School, Marietta, Georgia, where he has taught in the middle school since 1998. (Link here to excerpts from published and performed works.)

Before coming to Georgia, he taught seventeen years at St. Andrew's School in Jackson, Mississippi, where he was the first teacher to receive the Christian Allenburger Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching. St. Andrew's honored his work in fine arts in 2002 at the dedication of their fine arts center. During his years in Mississippi, he wrote a textbook Force and Law: Ten Leaders in Times of Crisis, privately printed, which he used to model historical research while covering the basic facts of American history through the life-stories of American heroes and anti-heroes. He continued his education with graduate courses in secondary education. He completed the four-year undergraduate extension program in theology from University of the South, Sewanee, and was a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities to study Montaigne and the development of the personal essay. He studied musical composition privately with Dr. James Sclater at Mississippi College, writing both music and text for a cycle of children's musical pageants The History of the Western World, an Advent cantata Four Candles, and numerous other songs and choral anthems. He earned his undergraduate degree at Duke University, graduating with distinction in English, specializing in the novels of Henry James. He was an A. B. Duke scholar at New College, Oxford.

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