William Dickey

William Dickey studied at Jesus College, Harvard University and Reed College. Training under John Berryman is recorded. The recorded working language is English. Residence is recorded at San Francisco. Employment is recorded with Cornell University, San Francisco State University and Denison University. Work by William Dickey is recorded in the collections of Oregon Poetry Collection. Distinctions recorded are Fulbright Scholarship and Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition.

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 Phi Beta Kappa Society. He was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and studied at Harvard University (Master of Arts, 1955) and the University of Iowa (Master of Fine Arts, 1956). 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:

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: It is possible to show evidence of great intelligence and sensibility but to be lacking in the first power essential to poetry, the power to speak, Mr. Dickey's lines have both. Among Dickey's 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 and taught as a professor of English and creative writing until his retirement in 1991.

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 the poem "The Death of John Berryman," about the suicide of his former teacher. It was published posthumously in Poetry (January 1996) 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.