Sarah Smith Ducksworth

Biography

DR. SARAH SMITH DUCKSWORTH

Sarah Frances Smith Ducksworth is a native of Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from Tougaloo College in 1965, with a major in English, she moved from Mississippi to Stony Brook, New York where she entered a master’s level program in literature at the State University of New York and completed course requirements for a master’s degree in literature in 1967 but never wrote the thesis. That same year, she moved to Flushing, New York and became an English teacher in the NY city school system.

In 1977, when her husband received a job job transfer, she and their two children moved to Berkeley Heights, NJ where they bought a home. The children entered public school and she entered Montclair State University to take courses in reading education. In 1978, she finally earned a master’s degree and became certified as a reading specialist. Upon the recommendation of the chairman of Montclair State’s Reading Department, she was hired to teach reading at Kean University in NJ. In 1980, she left Kean to pursue a doctorate degree in English Education at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. Her plan was to become expert in both the teaching of reading and writing and use her advanced degrees to become a director of a lab.

While Dr. Ducksworth worked toward her terminal degree, she received yearly contracts to teach freshman composition at Rutgers. In the spring of 1988, she graduated from Rutgers and returned to Kean to teach literature and writing courses. Based on her continued pursuit of excellence in the classroom and in the field of research, she was promoted to the rank of full professor in 2001.

In 2016, she retired from teaching and started a new career in creative writing. She finds writing poetry and prose very rewarding and loves to share with others the joy she gets from creating meaningful texts based on real life.