Snakeberry Mamas

Snakeberry Mamas

Snakeberry Mamas is the debut chapbook from Mary Alice Dixon, set in the wilds of an Appalachian landscape of lust, where sex, song, and witchy women charm the reader with chant. "In Snakeberry Mamas, Mary Alice Dixon casts a luminous eye on the hardscrabble sacred-braiding grief, grit, and grandmotherly magic into song. These are poems of invocation and inheritance, rooted in the red clay and mythos of mountain women who birth themselves from 'bloodroot' and 'fire.' Dixon writes with fierce tenderness and hard-earned clarity, inviting us into a world where 'owl women brush you with wishbones' and 'the moon bleeds' our names. This is Appalachian lyricism at its most incantatory, subversive, and deeply alive." AE Hines, author of Adam in the Garden and Any Dumb Animal "A wild, witty, and sometimes wicked witchery informs the poems of Mary Alice Dixon's Snakeberry Mamas. Herein, unforgettable Appalachian landscapes are voiced by characters-familial, historical, and mythical-who evoke a vision of transformative potions and folkloric wisdom. Snakeberry Mamas celebrates the strength of women as healers and magicians with poems that cast their welcome spell on the reader." Stuart Dischell, author of Good Hope Road and The Lookout Man Mary Alice Dixon is an award-winning poet, born in Appalachian coal dust and reared in Carolina red clay. She has a B.A. in Art History from Vassar College and an M.A. in Art History from Yale. 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 grief 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 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, 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.