With students Natasha Jordan Cornelius, Stephanie Michelle Handy, Benjamin Terrell Hubbard, Sharon Hunter, and Sash J Lodge, and Myderia Pittman, she contributed the page on Tina Ansa. Her special interests are in African American literature and African Literarture with an emphasis on female writers. She is writing a dissertation on Flora Nwapa, a Nigerian writer. Mears is from the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and has been teaching at Macon State for 16 years.