Mary Alice Dixon grew up in Carolina red clay mixed with Appalachian coal dust. She is a multiple Pushcart nominee and winner of the NC Writers' Network 2024 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition. She has also been a finalist for the NC Poetry Society Poet Laureate Award, for the Broad River Review Rash Award in Poetry and for the NC Writers' Network Doris Betts Prize in Fiction. Her work has been shortlisted for the Anthology (Ireland) Poetry Competition Award. She is a member of The American Academy of Poets, The Authors Guild, Charlotte Center for Literary Arts, Charlotte Writers Club, North Carolina Writers' Network, North Carolina Poetry Society, Poetry Society of South Carolina, South Carolina Writers Association, Hellbenders, and the Appalachian Studies Association. She has degrees from Vassar College, Yale University, and Wake Forest University.
Mary Alice's writings appear in dozens of anthologies, books and journals including Appalachian Places: Stories from the Highlands (East Tennesse State University), Anti-Heroin Chic, Bark & Blossom, Braided Way, Capsule Stories, Cathexis Northwest Press, Chaos Crisis & Conflict Antholog from Moonstone Arts Center, Clayjar Review, Fourth River, Gyroscope Review, Hard to Find: An Anthology of New Southern Gothic (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), Heron Tree, inScribe, Kakalak, Litmosphere, Main Street Rag, moonShine Review, Mythic Circle, North Dakota Quarterly, Northern Appalachia Review, Now or Never, Petigru Review, Pinesong, Poetry of the Wild Flowers: Tiny Seed Poetry Anthology, Skeleton Flowers, Raven's Perch, Stonecoast Review, storySouth, Sunlight Press, That Southern Thing, Trouble, Twists & Turns and elsewhere. Her poetry also appears in the North Carolina Poetry Society's Poetry in Plain Sight Posters displayed throughout North Carolina in 2024-25 and in 2025-26. She is delighted to have her poetry appear in a Charlotte Art League show running through 2025.
Mary Alice is honored to serve as a preliminary Judge for the Catholic Literary Arts Middle School Sacred Poetry Contests in 2025, 2024 and 2023 and as a preliminary Judge for the 2025 Catholic Literary Arts Sacred Poetry Contest featuring Ekphrastic Poems.
Mary Alice lives in Charlotte, NC where she has been an advocate for abused children and unhoused families, a professor of architectural and landscape history, and has long been involved with hospice. For many years Mary Alice has companioned the dying in nursing homes, often reading poetry at bedsides. She also conducts grief writing workshops and compassion workshops for hospice and other groups. These workshops gather the bereaved and their caregivers into the making of new nature rituals, found poems and sharing gingerbread and blueberry scones. Mary Alice also grows sunflowers with horseradish and walks with the ghosts of her dead cats, Thomas Merton and Alice B. Toklas.
