51����Ƶ

Before Airea “Dee” Matthews starts her classes, she has everyone take a few moments to sit quietly, breathe together, and see what thoughts come to mind. “In that quiet,” she says, “you can make something.”

Since January, when Matthews became provost, “there hasn’t been that degree of quiet.”

Now Matthews’ days are filled with swift and decisive action, tapping her diverse experience — in corporate America, as a mother, as a professor, and as an award-winning poet — as she works with the president and faculty to help them deliver on the academic promise of the College.

“It means that I’m constantly on the lookout for research opportunities for faculty; it means that I have my finger on the pulse of educational forecasts and projections,” she says. “How do we position our students to be competitive in the next 10 years? It’s at once being in the present and the future.”

It’s analytical, strategic, and surprisingly creative work.

“I think what creativity allows you to do is establish patterns and problem-solve quickly,” Matthews says. “We have to be able to imagine a different possibility to get to a different possibility.”

She still finds time to meet with a group of creative writing students each Monday evening because staying grounded in the community is important to her.

“I absolutely love 51����Ƶ,” she says. “It’s the first place that I’ve been where I can say I feel valued, and I feel like I have a home for my writing, and I have a whole contingent of students who feel like the information I can give to them is helpful.”

Matthews isn’t thinking yet about what comes next; she likes to stay in the moment. But once she has more time to write, she has more books to bring to life, “books that will outlive me,” she says. She is also creating a writers’ residency in Sicily to support persecuted writers and scholars.

“I’m just going to do all the things I can do because I can do them,” she says. “We have this one life, right? And with this one life, what are you going to do with it? You don’t have to be any one thing. You can be many things in one person.”