Crossing From Engineering Into Creative Writing

Posted December 5, 2023December 27, 2025 in Alumni, Creative Writing, Stories

Reading Time: 6 minutes

A career that began in engineering and scientific research ultimately found its most enduring expression in fiction, teaching, and scholarship. That path defines the work of Mary Anna Evans, an alumna of the Rutgers–Camden Creative Writing MFA program who leveraged formal study of craft to sharpen a voice she had already begun to develop on her own. Today an Associate Professor of Professional Writing at the University of Oklahoma, Evans is the author of multiple acclaimed novels that integrate her scientific background into richly imagined narratives, including The Physicists’ Daughter and The Traitor Beside Her, while continuing to publish, teach, and contribute to literary and academic communities shaped in meaningful ways by her time in Camden.

A Second Career in Writing

I came to creative writing as a second career. I have a Bachelor of Science in Engineering Physics and a Master of Science in Chemical Engineering. After earning my MS, I taught math and science at a community college, later working as a consultant for an environmental engineering firm. In my spare time, I wrote poetry and short stories and, eventually, a novel called ‘Artifacts’ that was published in 2003. It began a series of crime novels featuring archaeologist Faye Longchamp. I had published seven novels in that series when I decided that I wanted to formally study this thing that I’d taught myself to do, so I returned to graduate school to study literary fiction and nonfiction at Rutgers-Camden.

My time at Rutgers-Camden was a wonderful experience in every way, and I learned a great deal about writing and literature.
Mary Anna Evans

My time at Rutgers-Camden was a wonderful experience in every way, and I learned a great deal about writing and literature. When I turned in my next book, my editor said, “You’ve really kicked it up a notch,” and that’s exactly what I’d hoped to do when I decided to spend two years deeply studying the art and craft of writing. In the last semester of my MFA, I wrote an article about Camden and its history for The Atlantic’s Technology Channel, which was a lovely way to say goodbye to a place that had become very special to me.

When I graduated, I took a job as an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma, where I’ve been teaching writers since 2015, earning tenure in 2021. In the years since I graduated, I published six more books in my archaeological series, which won recognition like the Will Rogers Medallion Award Gold Medal and the Oklahoma Book Award, as well as many short stories and essays. In 2019, I decided it was time for something new, so I wrote a historical novel set during WWII called The Physicists’ Daughter that I pitched as Bletchley Park-meets-Rosie-the-Riveter. It won my second Oklahoma Book Award, and The Traitor Beside Her follows its protagonist, physicist Justine Byrne, as she works undercover as a codebreaker. It was released in June to a wonderful reception that included a review in the Washington Post.

During my time at the University of Oklahoma, I became interested in academic scholarship on the work of Agatha Christie, particularly in the portrayal of women and justice in the twentieth century. This work resulted in an invitation to serve as senior editor of the Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie, which was received well by the crime fiction community, being short-listed for the Edgar, Agatha, HRF Keating, and Macavity Awards.

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Life in Camden, On and Off the Page

I lived in an apartment on the top floor of The Victor with a stupendous view of Philadelphia and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. From there, I could walk to class and to the classes I was teaching. The River Line and the subway took me to New York and to Philadelphia and beyond, and this was a dream for a lifelong suburbanite. As an engineer, I found the historic homes and factory buildings around the university to be fascinating. My classes, too, were fascinating. My professors were kind and devoted to helping us improve our work, and my classmates were fun and talented. I wouldn’t trade my time in Camden for anything.

The Science Behind the Fiction

The protagonist of The Traitor Beside Her and The Physicists’ Daughter, Justine Byrne, was a character I had lived my whole life to write. I was able to give her my interest in science by giving her parents who were both physicists, a rare thing in 1944. In addition to her father, Gerard, there are actually two female physicists in Justine’s life, her mother Isabel and her godmother Gloria, and they taught Justine things that made her something of a secret weapon during a world war. Nobody would have expected a young woman of her day to be able to go to her factory job, look around, and think, “My boss is lying to me about what I’m making. Also, somebody’s trying to sabotage our work.” Justine’s skills save the secret military project she’s working on in The Physicists’ Daughter, and they get her a chance to go undercover in The Traitor Beside Her to root out a spy intent on learning the Allies’ military secrets.

New Projects on the Horizon

I’m working on a standalone Gothic novel set in the Hudson River Valley in 1942, featuring a young female English professor who is learning that her charming, erudite parents were lying about pretty much everything. I’m also working on an academic book called Witness to the Evolution: Agatha Christie, Women, Justice, and the Twentieth Century.