About me

I’m a writer, editor, and recently retired Creative Writing Professor. I teach an array of writing workshops and run a small business helping people tell their stories.

My life has moved in stages that seem to come in 15-year units, with the first professional stage in Washington, D.C. where I worked as a writer and editor at National Geographic and the Smithsonian and taught part-time at Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Writing Program. I won the Teaching Award there and earned national recognition for my magazine work and books. In 2007, I returned to my native Connecticut for a tenured position as a Creative Writing Professor in Narrative Nonfiction at Central CT State University (CCSU), where I also won the Teaching Award.

Now, about 15 years later, I am moving into a third stage of my professional life with a studio at the amazing Farmington Valley Arts Center in Avon, CT, where I run writing workshops for FVAC as well as for public libraries and others, including the Yale Summer Writing Program, and have launched my new business, The Collins Story Exchange. I work in in tandem with my son Blake Collins (designer and editor) to coach people through their life stories, some modest, others grand, and then, depending on the content, produce a print and digital publication that they can share with family, friends, and/or their community. It might be an 8-page mini-magazine (a booklette), a 32-page four-color magazine or even a book. We have extensive experience in all three forms. Check out samples by clicking on The Collins Story Exchange tab!

My goal: To use more than three decades of experience as a writer and editor to help families and organizations shape the stories they want to tell into something readable and layered. Most story sharing companies offer simple transcription with limited narrative structuring, or only conduct basic email Q&As; Collins Story Exchange goes far beyond that approach.

Stop by my studio to chat or learn more:

Farmington Valley Arts Center
25 Arts Center Lane, Avon, CT 06001

Studio 8A
Hours of Operation:

  • Monday, Tuesday, Thursday
    10am-2pm

  • First Saturday of every month
    12-4pm

  • Or by appointment

Select Awards & Honors

TEACHING

Winner, Campus Compact College Community Educator Award, awarded to one professor each year for their work with the community. Nearly every private and public college and university in the state participates in CCC, which highlights pairing with community partners. My nonfiction undergraduate students worked with mothers who lost sons in the Vietnam War to produce a magazine, which we called the Gold Star Magazine Project. I raised $10,000 to produce 1000 magazines of their stories, done in conjunction with my student writers, and we gave them out for free to Gold Star families across the state.

Director, CCSU Center for Teaching and Faculty Development, for three years. The Center created the Mary Collins Service Award to recognize faculty at CCSU for their service to other faculty.

Winner, Teaching Award, Central Connecticut State University, given to just one full-time faculty each year.

Winner, Teaching Award, Johns Hopkins MA in Writing Program, where I taught nonfiction workshops part-time for 12 years and ran events and special programs.

WRITING AWARDS

Poynter Fellow, which funded a visiting authors visit by me and my son and co-author, Donald Blake Collins, to Yale's Medical School for a special program on working with families of transgender children.

Awarded Best Memoir of the Year by the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), for At the Broken Places: A Mother and Trans Son Pick Up the Pieces, Beacon Press, 

Awarded Best Essay of the Year (twice) by the American Society of Journalists and Authors for an essay in the Washington Post, Don't Have a Seat, about recovering from back surgery and our debilitating sitting culture; and for The Bookcase, originally published in the Potomac Review

New York Public Library ranked my Young Adult book, Airborne: A Photobiography of Wilbur and Orville Wright (National Geographic Books) a Top 10 YA book of the year

Awarded best YA book of the Year by the American Society of Journalists and Authors for Airborne: A Photobiography of Wilbur and Orville Wright

OTHER HONORS

National Park Service, Artist-in-Resident, Petrified Forest, with former National Geographic Photographer and National Wildlife Federation Photographer and Editor Susan McElhinney. We profiled people who work, volunteer or visit the park. The exhibit was in the Visitor’s Center and we had a special show at Wolf Trap in Virginia, the National Park Service’s cultural venue.

ABOVE: Mary with CCSU students for a reading event for the Writing Minors Program; Mary and her son Blake Collins at the Harvard Bookstore for a signing event for their book; Mary during an interview recording at WNPR studios in CT.