Snakeberry Mamas — Mary Alice Dixon

Born in Appalachian coal dust and reared in Carolina red clay, Mary Alice Dixon is an award winning poet, a gardener, and a teacher. She majored in Art History at Vassar College and did graduate work at Yale University. Her passion for gardening and history shaped her work as a professor of architectural and landscape history, which she taught at universities in Charlotte, Minneapolis, and China. She gave invited lectures on design history to audiences in Finland, Canada, and throughout the United States. She has also served as a Guardian ad Litem for abused children and an advocate for unhoused families. Mary Alice has long volunteered with hospice, reading poetry to the dying and facilitating writing workshops for the bereaved. She is a multiple Pushcart nominee, winner of both the North Carolina Writers’ Network Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition and the Poetry Society of South Carolina John Edward Johnson Prize. Mary Alice is also a past finalist for the Broad River Review Rash Award in Poetry, the NC Writers’ Network Doris Betts Fiction Prize and for the NC Poetry Society Poet Laureate Award. Her work is in scores of publications, including Appalachian Places, Broad River Review, Fourth River, Gyroscope Review, Kakalak, Litmosphere, Main Street Rag, moonShine Review, Mythic Circle, Pinesong, North Dakota Quarterly, Stonecoast Review, storySouth, and elsewhere. She lives in Charlotte where she talks to the ghosts of her dead cats, Thomas Merton and Alice B. Toklas, and grows sunflowers in cow manure. Find her at maryalicedixon.com

Title: Snakeberry Mamas
Author: Mary Alice Dixon
Format: Paperback, 5.5" x 8.5"
ISBN: 978-1-960558-12-1
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Publisher: Charlotte Lit Press

In Snakeberry Mamas Mary Alice Dixon’s words from the wild conjure an Appalachian landscape of lust, where sex, song, and witchy women charm the reader with chant. From the crossroads of Witcher Way Holler to the waters of Hungry River, these poems carry you into a magic world of owl-women, dandelion girls, and the memories of dead mothers alive in the heartwood of trees. In these liminal places grief makes knife blades of red pickled eggs; a goddess offers salvation in tongue of fire; a hellfire-and-brimstone suffragette shares a recipe for britches with balls. Recipient of the NC Writers’ Network Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry, a NC Poetry Society Poet Laureate Award finalist, multiple Pushcart nominee, and past professor of architectural and landscape history, Mary Alice Dixon makes poetry that muses mountains and maps gardens you will never want to leave.

Out of stock? Please order from Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/a/98214/9781960558121. Thanks!