Martha Elizabeth Chew, 1941-1984

Martha Elizabeth Chew was born on January 9, 1941, in Statesville, North Carolina, to Robert Lee Chew and Sarah Catherine (Cox) Chew; the family moved to Winston-Salem early in MEC's childhood. With a B.A. in English (1963) from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, she attended summer writing workshops at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City, and received an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University(1964), and a Ph.D. in English from Boston University (1976) with a dissertation on Flannery O'Connor. She married Robert Stephen Blaisdell in 1966; they were later divorced. She taught at Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, and Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Sciences, where she was associate professor of English. She founded the Women's Center at MCP/AHS in 1982 and died on October 9, 1984.