Sandra Mason has lived a life devoted to reading, writing, teaching, and publishing. As a Shakespeare scholar, she published in "Renaissance & Reformation" one of the first essays to focus on the language of Ophelia (rather than of Hamlet) and in "Shakespeare Quarterly" a seminal article on economic language in the history plays; she helped bring to critical light the first woman playwright in England, Elizabeth Cary. After a full academic career, Mason is author of five books, one of them scholarly (Econolingua) (revised edition, Shakespeare's Money Talks), two of them volumes of poems (Poems along the Way and Lost and Found), two novels (The Lighthouse Ghost of Yaquina Bay and Shakespeare's Pipe), and one a biographical sketch of her late husband, J.Carl Ellston of Exeter, Missouri. With the Tuesday Writers of Waldport, she has been working on both memoirs and a philosophical self-help book on love. Her poems and essays are widely published in journals and anthologies, most recently in The Oregonian, Groundwaters, Oregon Stories, Subjectiv, and Seeds of . . . After a full career as a professor and an administrator, she lives in the perfect spot overlooking the sea on the central Oregon coast. Community activities Alexandra Mason was selected by the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences to help lead workshops to train new deans. She served as a consultant to the New York Court System in developing testing for court reporters. Mason has been a consulting editor for decades, reading manuscripts for St. Martin's Press, "Mosaic," "The Journal of Evolutionary Psychology," and "Theatre Survey," among others. She began her editing career as a graduate student at UCLA, working on The Dryden Project. She taught adult learners at the Bethlehem (NY) Institute for Lifelong Learning and continues to offer writing courses for the Oregon Coast CC. She has served as a judge for Shakespeare recitation contests and many poetry contests, and she has traveled around the state giving Chautauqua presentations on "My Shakespeare," an examination of the changing image of Shakespeare through the centuries. She was named a "Woman of Vision and Courage" by Eastern Oregon University, and she was inducted into the Hall of Fame at North Salem (Oregon) High School for lifetime achievement. Her collaboration with director Ken Bush for Albany's (NY) production of "As You Like It" was cited for excellence by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Theatre Awards. In La Grande, Oregon she chaired the city Mural Committee and ran a weekly themed film series for the community. On the Oregon coast she founded and organized the annual Northwest Poets' Concord and served as President of Writers on the Edge. Alexandra Mason is a long-time member of the Tuesday Writers of Waldport and publishes their annual anthology. This anthology, called simply TUESDAY, and an annual anthology representing work presented at the Northwest Poets' CONCORD, are both available on amazon.com. Along with Ruth F. Harrison, Mason is instrumental in helping other local poets see their work into print. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1980.After that, she was a professor at the State University of New York at Albany, where she received both the President's and the Chancellor's Awards for Excellence in Teaching and was chair of undergraduate studies in English and co-director of the Humanities Center. She has conducted research at the Folger Shakespeare Library and received an American Council of Learned Societies grant to participate in the World Shakespeare Conference in Berlin. She specializes in studies of metaphor, particularly metaphors of value and coinage, and is author of Econolingua (1985). Her articles on Renaissance dramatist Elizabeth Cary and on the character Ophelia in Hamlet are widely reprinted. As a research fellow at the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities, she applied metaphors of value and valuation to Shakespeare's history plays. Her scholarly articles appear in various learned journals. She has spent the last decade as a creative writer of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and drama. Her works appear in various literary magazines, and she was a recipient of the Oregon Literary Arts fellowship award in drama. She is founder and organizer of the Northwest Poets' Concord.