Beth Ann Mathews is a marine biologist and a mother of one son. She grew up in a large family in the Midwest and earned a degree in Animal Science at Purdue University. As a professor at the University of Alaska Southeast, Beth taught courses in biology, behavioral ecology, and marine mammalogy and led research on harbor seals, Steller sea lions, and harbor porpoises with her students, mainly in Glacier Bay National Park. After twenty years in Alaska, Beth and her husband sold their home to begin an expedition with their young son on the family’s 42-foot sailboat from Alaska to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez.

Feedback from her blog during the three-year journey inspired her to write stories about their sailing adventures as well as Deep Waters, a memoir about her family’s struggle to survive, and move beyond, her husband’s unusual stroke in 2008. This memoir won the Memoirs (personal struggle/health issues) category of the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and a bronze award in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, for Best Regional Non-Fiction, West-Pacific region.

Deep Waters is a gripping, intimate story of relationship resilience set against the backdrop of Alaska’s dramatic marine wilderness. A marine biologist’s adventurous life as a professor, wife, and mother in Alaska is upended when her healthy husband is slammed by a rare type of stroke. His radical approach to recovery clashes with her instinct to keep him safe at home and sets them on a collision course as he insists on ambitious sailing expeditions with Beth and their young son in Alaska’s magnificent yet unforgiving waters.