Poet and dedicated teacher most loved mentoring young writers
Mary Jane Phillips Dickerson died peacefully in her Jericho Center, Vt., home on Thursday, October 3, 2024, of heart and lung disease. Born on September 29, 1937, to Angus Peter Phillips, a merchant farmer, and Sue Sherrill Phillips, a schoolteacher, Mary Jane was raised in the village of Cameron in the Sandhills of North Carolina. During her childhood in this close-knit farming community, Mary Jane developed a passion for gardening and a keen appreciation for small-town lore that eventually led to her fascination with William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels and a career as a college English teacher and poet. Mary Jane earned an undergraduate degree in English and history in 1959 at what was then the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. There she began to write poems in creative writing classes with Randall Jarrell, who steered her toward writing about her native North Carolina Sandhills. Mary Jane went on to earn a master’s degree in English at the University of North Carolina in summer 1960. At Chapel Hill, she went on a legendary first date to a Robert Frost reading with a lean, witty and diffident fellow graduate student from Vermont, A. Inskip Dickerson Jr., whom she would marry in 1961. They lived in Chapel Hill, where Mary Jane continued graduate study in English part time with the births of their children, Bert and Ann Meigs, in 1962 and 1965, while Skip completed his doctoral studies. They moved to Vermont in 1966 for Skip’s position as an assistant professor in English at the University of Vermont and to Jericho Center in 1968, where they bought a dilapidated brick farmhouse in the center of town, whose renovation and landscaping became their shared labor of love. From the beginning of her time in Vermont, Mary Jane — an elegant and refined feminist from the South who embraced all that Vermont had to offer — cut a striking figure. She contributed tirelessly to the English department’s program during her 34-year career at the University of Vermont, where she served as the director of freshman English, associate director of writing and, in 1996, associate professor of English. Mary Jane developed courses in women’s autobiography and African American literature (UVM’s first) on the undergraduate and graduate levels. In 1997, she was awarded the George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award and was thrilled to be invited in her final years of…
Poet and dedicated teacher most loved mentoring young writers
Mary Jane Phillips Dickerson died peacefully in her Jericho Center, Vt., home on Thursday, October 3, 2024, of heart and lung disease. Born on September 29, 1937, to Angus Peter Phillips, a merchant farmer, and Sue Sherrill Phillips, a schoolteacher, Mary Jane was raised in the village of Cameron in the Sandhills of North Carolina. During her childhood in this close-knit farming community, Mary Jane developed a passion for gardening and a keen appreciation for small-town lore that eventually led to her fascination with William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels and a career as a college English teacher and poet. Mary Jane earned an undergraduate degree in English and history in 1959 at what was then the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. There she began to write poems in creative writing classes with Randall Jarrell, who steered her toward writing about her native North Carolina Sandhills. Mary Jane went on to earn a master’s degree in English at the University of North Carolina in summer 1960. At Chapel Hill, she went on a legendary first date to a Robert Frost reading with a lean, witty and diffident fellow graduate student from Vermont, A. Inskip Dickerson Jr., whom she would marry in 1961. They lived in Chapel Hill, where Mary Jane continued graduate study in English part time with the births of their children, Bert and Ann Meigs, in 1962 and 1965, while Skip completed his doctoral studies. They moved to Vermont in 1966 for Skip’s position as an assistant professor in English at the University of Vermont and to Jericho Center in 1968, where they bought a dilapidated brick farmhouse in the center of town, whose renovation and landscaping became their shared labor of love. From the beginning of her time in Vermont, Mary Jane — an elegant and refined feminist from the South who embraced all that Vermont had to offer — cut a striking figure. She contributed tirelessly to the English department’s program during her 34-year career at the University of Vermont, where she served as the director of freshman English, associate director of writing and, in 1996, associate professor of English. Mary Jane developed courses in women’s autobiography and African American literature (UVM’s first) on the undergraduate and graduate levels. In 1997, she was awarded the George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award and was thrilled to be invited in her final years of…