Jack Matthews

Jack Matthews is a former professor of history and anthropology at colleges and universities in Texas. He held tenures at Amarillo College and Cisco College in Texas, and lectured at University of Texas at Arlington and TCU on the anthropology of religion and Native American history.

Born in Brownwood, Texas, Matthews was reared in small town, rural environments, working on his uncles’ ranches and living alongside the Colorado River and Cherokee and Rough Creeks. He sang in church and school choirs, eventually earning a scholarship in music at the University of Texas at Austin.

Traveling to Albuquerque as a child, Matthews remembers the snow-capped Sandia Mountains and the velveteen skirts and silver jewelry of the Navajo. He is a mountaineer and outdoorsman, having climbed Truchas Peaks, Mt. Pedernal, and San Mateo Peak in New Mexico—some of them more than once. He completed archaeological field school at Ghost Ranch, near Abiquiu, and conducted undergraduate field trips to northern New Mexico when professor at Amarillo College.

Matthews lectured at German-American Institutes on “Wounded Knee Revisited” in Stuttgart, Munich, and Nuremberg, bringing together a presentation on the tragic Ghost Dance, Wounded Knee Massacre, and the 1973 Occupation.

He is a member of Western Writers Association, New Mexico Acequia Association, American Quarter Horse Association, and is a contributor to book reviews in scholarly journals. His juried article, “The Influence of the Panhandle-Plains on Georgia O’Keeffe,” has been reprinted and acclaimed. Matthews’ Ph.D. dissertation was on the U.S. consular corps to Mexico, 1821-1865.

Jack divides his time between Fort Worth, Texas, and Taos, New Mexico, where his son-in-law and daughter have a home where he writes, researches, and visits his friends—Puebloans, pastores, and Taoseños. He trades the "old way" with his Puebloan friends.

"Death at La Osa, A Pueblo Tribal Police Mystery," is the first of a series of novels on the Puebloan, Hispano, and Anglo cultures through the seasonal and ceremonial cycles of northern New Mexico. A second novel has been completed, and Jack is currently finishing the third novel that takes the Tafoya, Ortega, and Coe families through Christmas and the New Year holidays. "I consider these novels a saga of mesa, mountains, and families of northern New Mexico."