Kayla McKinney Wiggins

Kayla McKinney Wiggins, Professor, English
Email: kwiggins@martinmethodist.edu
Office Phone:  931-363-9859
Office: Martin Hall

I am a Texan who moved to Tennessee almost 22 years ago for the trees—and a job.  After I had taken the position at Martin Methodist College, I found out that my mother’s family was originally from Columbia, Tennessee.  They had traveled to Texas by wagon in 1911, seven years before my mother was born.  I have been an avid reader since third grade and a writer since I was nine years old.  I didn’t know that the two passions would come together in the realm of teaching until I was in college myself and realized that I wanted one day to be a professor.  Even though teaching is a full-time-plus job, I still find time to write.  I am the author of Modern Verse Drama in English (Greenwood, 1993), a contributing author to a number of books and journals, and the author of more than a dozen children’s plays.   As Managing Editor for campus publications at MMC, I also am privileged to write for The Columns magazine.   I have completed a first-draft of a fantasy novel and am currently working on an adolescent novel that is a ghost story.  I have read and collected ghost stories since I was a child and one of my favorite things to do is to tell ghost stories.  Because I love to tell stories, I recently joined the National Storytelling Network.  I am also the Area Chair for Theatre and Drama for the National PCA Conference and have directed over 40 plays.  Despite all of these interests, I am still passionate about teaching and consider teaching and my students to be my main job.  Some of my favorite classes to teach include Ghost Stories, Shakespeare, Creative Writing, and Women’s Literature.