William Dickey (poet)


William Hobart Dickey was an American poet and professor of English and creative writing at San Francisco State University. He authored 15 books of poetry over a career that lasted three and a half decades.

Early life and education

Dickey was born in 1928 in Bellingham, Washington and was raised in Washington and Oregon. He attended Reed College, graduating in 1951. At Reed he wrote a novel for his bachelor's thesis and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
He was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and went on to study at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. As a Fulbright scholar he studied at Jesus College at the University of Oxford from 1959 to 1960.
Dickey was a student of John Berryman at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He later recalled:

Literary and academic career

Dickey's first collection of poetry, Of the Festivity, was selected by W.H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1959. In the foreword to the book, Auden wrote:
Among Dickey's subsequent collections of poetry, More Under Saturn won a silver medal from the Commonwealth Club of California in 1972, and The Rainbow Grocery received the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press in 1978.
Dickey was an instructor in English at Cornell University from 1956 to 1959, and an assistant professor of English at Denison University from 1960 to 1962. In 1962 he joined the faculty of San Francisco State University as a professor of English and creative writing, teaching there until his retirement in 1991.

Personal life

Dickey lived in San Francisco with his companion Leonard Sanazaro, a poet who taught English and creative writing at the City College of San Francisco.
Dickey died in 1994 at Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco. The cause was complications from HIV-related surgeries. Shortly before his death, Dickey finished a poem, "The Death of John Berryman," about the suicide of his former teacher. It was published posthumously in Poetry and The Best American Poetry 1997.
In 1996 a collection of Dickey's poems and books was deposited at the Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library.

Published work

Dickey's published works of poetry include:
His poems have also appeared in many anthologies, including:
Dickey also experimented with Hypercard poetry, which is available at the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities